


Tailspin

by chiiyo86



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Delusions, Dysfunctional Family, Family Bonding, Family Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Breakdown, No Apocalypse, Paranoia, Psychosis, Self-Mutilation, friendly to all the siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-01-15 14:41:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18501085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: Five is sure that he's being followed. He knows there's a possibility that the Commission isn't done with the Hargreeves siblings - but he'll protect his family, no matter what.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [telm_393](https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/gifts).



> This treat got _much_ longer than I planned it to be when I started. In my defense, I really, really liked your letter and it's my first fic for the fandom so I got a little enthusiastic. Hope you'll enjoy reading the fic as much as I enjoyed writing it!

_Tap, tap, tap, tap._

“You’re driving me crazy,” Ben said from his spot on the back of the couch.

“Love you too, bro,” Klaus said, blowing him a kiss and then shaping his fingers as a heart for good measure. 

Ben flipped him the bird and Klaus laughed, then went back to drumming his fingers on every surface available to his restless hands—his thighs, the arm of the couch he was leaning on, the cushions. He shoved his body downward until he was lying upside down, head on the cushions and legs draped over the back of the couch, next to where Ben was sitting. There were ants under his skin—not _literal_ ants, thank God, and he wasn’t hallucinating ants either, which had happened a few times during some particularly bad trips, but the metaphor was pretty damn apt to describe what he was feeling right now. He wanted, he needed—

He knew what he needed, and what he couldn’t— _shouldn’t_ —get, not if he wanted to keep using his power on Ben, and to be able to summon Dave. He _would_ get around to doing that one day, but he was waiting for the right moment. This was what he told Ben when his brother brought up the topic. He shouldn’t be thinking about Dave either, because it always put a damper on his mood.

“I’m so _bored,_ ” he whined instead. 

“And annoying. If you’re that bored, then get your ass off that couch and go _do_ something.”

“Now, Ben,” Klaus said, his index up in the air, “you’re making way too much sense. I can’t take it this early in the morning.”

“It’s two in the afternoon.”

“Oh, semantics—"

“Klaus! Ben! Family emergency meeting!”

Luther barking at him startled Klaus and he flailed, crashing down loudly on the floor and managing to hit his chin with his knee in the process. He gathered his limbs and propped himself up, his body tingly with the rush of adrenaline Luther’s call had caused. He was wary, but curious too. There were ‘family meetings’, and then there were ‘family _emergency_ meetings’, and the latter ones often involved unpleasant things like people wanting to kill them or the end of the world. Then again, whatever happened at the emergency meeting meant that Klaus wouldn’t be bored or restless for at least a little while. You win some, you lose some.

“Wanna take a bet on what this is about?” Klaus asked Ben. “Apocalypse redux? Dad coming back from the dead? God, I think I prefer the apocalypse.”

Ben was no fun and he only rolled his eyes. “Let’s just go and see for ourselves.”

“After you, _mon frère_ ,” Klaus said, springing on his feet and bowing exaggeratedly low to Ben.

He sauntered after his ghost brother, down the corridor and the stairs that would lead them to the drawing room where all family meetings happened. Since Vanya had taken down the old house over their heads, they’d been rebuilding, something less grandiose than before although the new house was still pretty big given that only Klaus, Luther and Five lived there full-time. Vanya still had her own place, Diego technically had kept his room at the gym, but was here so often Klaus wasn’t sure it counted, and Allison rented an apartment a few blocks away. Luther had tried to convince her to stay with them, but she’d said she wanted a space of her own that could be a home to Claire once Allison had regained custody of her. The house, even rebuilt anew, was too closely tied to the Umbrella Academy, and Klaus guessed he couldn’t blame Allison for trying to shield her daughter from the batshit insanity of their childhood. He was actually surprised she seemed so chill with the notion of them meeting their niece somewhere down the road. He wished her good luck with explaining to Claire why Uncle Luther had half the body of an ape, why Uncle Five looked barely any older than she was, why Uncle Diego only wore black spandex—sorry, _leather_ —and why Uncle Ben was invisible. Auntie Vanya was in a category of her own, and Uncle Klaus was the uncle every little girl dreamed of, thank you very much. 

Only half of the house was currently habitable, which was more than enough for them, and Klaus and Allison had put their heads together to decide on the interior design. It meant less marble, less stuffed animals on the walls, less dreary portraits of daddy dearest and memorabilia from the good old days of the Umbrella Academy. It was also less flamboyant than Klaus had wanted, because Allison had put her foot down on his best suggestions—he’d been very fond of his idea of having a slide in the dining room, so that was a shame, but he was holding out hope for the part of the house that was still under construction. No way Allison would say no to his flamingo-themed playroom.

He entered the drawing room, a cozy room layered with thick rugs, throws and pillows. It had black window frames, white walls, and a ceiling crisscrossed with white wooden beams. Luther was standing by one of the windows, his face bathed in sunlight like in one of those old-timey paintings of the saints, facing the couch where Allison, Vanya and Diego were sitting like a man at a business meeting.

“Wait a minute,” Klaus said, stopping on the doorstep. He made a show of counting his siblings, pointing his finger at each of them. “Number One, Number Two, Number Three.” He pointed at his own chest. “Number Four, Number Six.” His finger pointed at nothing, because Ben was standing right by his side, but it made all his siblings stare on cue at the empty spot. Ben twitched in irritation. “Number Seven. Math isn’t my forte, but I think the count isn’t right.”

“Where’s Five?” Diego asked. “Shouldn’t we wait for him before we talk about whatever is so important?”

“I think he has his yoga class at eleven,” Vanya said. 

_‘Five has his yoga class,’_ Klaus thought, sounded like this figure of speech that put together two things that contradict each other, what was it again—an _oxymoron_. But Five had decided to give post-apocalypse life his all and he was nothing if not diligent, so he went to a ton of classes, keeping himself busy with a sort of fretful intensity. He had a photography class, a crochet class, a few different language classes, and belonged to a chess club. He’d done oil painting, until the teacher got too disturbed by some of the things he painted, and woodworking until an incident with another student that involved a scroll saw. Like a proud mother, Luther had hung one of Five’s most family-friendly paintings on the wall of the drawing room they were in, right between two windows. It depicted a bleak apocalyptic landscape in harsh, angry strokes, gray with rubbles and ashes. Klaus didn’t like looking at it. It made his stomach churn with unease.

“We’re not waiting for Five,” Luther said. The way he shuffled his feet clued Klaus in on what he was about to say next. “He’s actually what I wanted us to talk about.”

The room was silent for a few long seconds after that declaration. Allison looked at Vanya, Vanya looked at Luther, and Diego stifled a groan. 

“Are we sure it’s a good idea to discuss a family member behind their back?” Ben asked Luther, angled toward him as though Luther could hear him. And since it had become Klaus’ fucking job to be his dead brother’s voice, Klaus sighed and dutifully relayed what Ben had said. 

“It’s not like that!” Luther exclaimed, looking at the spot where Klaus had pretended Ben was earlier. “I’m not trying to—I’m just. Hear me out, I promise this isn’t anything bad.”

He was looking at Vanya as he said that last part. Three months ago, after Allison had disrupted Vanya’s power craze by shooting next to her ear—brilliant move, that—and Vanya had released her built-up energy harmlessly at the sky, she’d been too drained for a few weeks to use her power. This had allowed them to discuss everything that had happened without risking the roof crashing down on them again. Not calmly, not rationally, and God knew that Klaus had often wished for the sweet, sweet refuge of drugs during those conversations, but they’d all promised to try. They’d all said they wanted to be a family again. Their childhood together had sucked, but as their time-travelling, crazy apocalypse survivor of a brother had once said, they shouldn’t let it define them. And the lives they’d led separately for the past decade hadn’t been glowing successes either—Klaus was the first to acknowledge that. So here they were, hoping that they could find their way together better than they had apart. The awkwardness and tension from past deeds was greater between Luther and Vanya, and they could all feel it right now, making the air electric. Allison looked like she wanted to step in, but even Klaus could have told her that it wasn’t a good idea.

“So tell us,” Vanya said in a measured voice. “What’s going on with Five?”

Luther let a slow exhale escape him. Had he been worried Vanya would get mad and lose control? The thought only belatedly occurred to Klaus, who grimaced. Vanya’s powers were some scary shit, and Klaus was man enough to admit it to himself—and to Ben—even though it was in opposition with the current policy of family harmony to say it to anyone else.

“I went to the Glimbel Brothers department store earlier today,” Luther said. “I needed batteries. I could have sworn we had some, but I looked everywhere and I didn’t—”

“Not that this isn’t fascinating,” Diego said, “but what does it have to do with Five?”

“Dolores is _gone_.”

Luther eyed them expectantly. Vanya was the first to speak up, “Who’s Dolores?” she asked with a frown.

Klaus turned to Ben and whispered, “Doesn’t the name Dolores ring a bell? I could swear I’ve heard it before. I heard Five say it. Oh!” he exclaimed more loudly before Ben could reply. “Oh, I remember. Five said that he was in a relationship for thirty years with someone named Dolores. Huh.”

When Five had said that to him, Klaus had been high enough that his only thought had been, ‘ _hey, good for him!’_ Now that he was giving it some sober thinking, it seemed weird, given the apocalyptical destruction that Five described, that anyone would have survived it. Five had merely been lucky—or unlucky—enough to time-travel after the fact.

“Don’t tell me that—” He looked at Luther with wide eyes. “Dolores is the _mannequin_?”

“You mean that bald, one-armed mannequin he was carrying around everywhere?” Allison asked in the pained, raspy wisp of voice she used these days—which was actually progress from when they hadn’t known if she would ever speak again. One day at a time, they said in rehab.

“Yeah,” Luther said.

“And he gave it a name?”

“Yeah, I think he—I don’t think he knew she wasn’t a real person.”

“ _She_ ,” Diego repeated, raising a pointed eyebrow.

“She’s a ‘she’ for Five,” Luther said. “He brought her back to the store, trying to move on, I suppose, but now she’s gone. I asked the manager about it, because I hoped I could buy her back, but they’ve thrown her away. So I was thinking, we should keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t go to the department store. We can work in shifts, and—”

“Luther.” Allison’s voice was barely audible, but Luther was attuned to it like a cat to the sound of a can being opened and he cut himself off. “Why not tell him the truth? That she’s—gone.”

“Yeah,” Klaus chimed in, “what’s the worst that can happen?”

Luther gave him an incredulous look, his eyebrows raised comically. “Have you _met_ Five?”

“Okay, fair point.”

“We can’t be watching Five all the time,” Diego said. “He’s a slippery little bastard. Even if we managed to keep an eye on him, how long do you propose we do that? A week? A month? Our whole lives?”

“So we’re going to just tell him?” Luther said, looking at Diego, at Allison and then, unexpectedly, at Vanya, as though trying to appeal to her. “We’re just going to tell him: you know, the one person that kept you sane through years of apocalyptic wasteland, well, some asshole manager just decided to—”

Klaus’ ears caught a familiar humming sound. It took a couple of seconds for his brain to catch up to what it was and why it was bad news under the current circumstances. He opened his mouth to warn Luther—

“—to just trash her like a vulgar _object_. What do you think it’ll do to Five to hear that?”

“What will it do to me to hear what?”

Luther stopped in his rant, mouth open like a fish. The others were silent too, all staring at their brother, who had just materialized in a corner of the room by the fireplace—all but Klaus, who couldn’t help saying, “Hey, Luther, I think Five’s back.”

“I—” Luther said, then obviously couldn’t think of a good way to finish that sentence. His teeth clicked when he snapped his mouth shut.

“I forgot my yoga mat,” Five said, in a perfectly cool and collected voice.

Most of his uniforms from the Umbrella Academy days had been damaged beyond repair in the destruction of the house, so Allison had eventually managed to drag him on a shopping trip. He’d absolutely refused to get anything that would made him look like a regular teenager of the year of Our Lord 2019—he’d also quite rudely refused Klaus’ fashion advices—so he was wearing a button-up white shirt and black slack pants, and looked like he might start selling Bibles at a moment’s notice. 

“Five,” said Vanya, standing from where she sat on the couch next to Allison. “We have bad news. It’s about Dolores. Luther went to the store recently, and she’s, she’s gone.”

“Oh.” Five’s face was a careful mask that let nothing through, but after a few months of getting reacquainted with his brother, Klaus knew that there was probably a lot going on behind it. “Well. Maybe she needed a change of scenery. We broke up. She can do whatever she pleases.”

Vanya exchanged a look with Allison, probably wondering whether letting him believe that wasn’t the best option. Luther, taking advantage of the fact that Five wasn’t looking in his direction, was doing a frantic eyebrow dance, trying to convey, ‘ _DON’T SAY ANYTHING.’_ Klaus honestly didn’t know what the right thing to do was here, so he decided he should let them handle it.

“No,” Vanya said. Maybe she was purposefully doing the opposite of what Luther wanted, or maybe she genuinely thought it was best to tell the truth. In any case, she went on, “Luther asked about it—about her—to the manager, and they, apparently they threw her away. To, to the trash.” She paused, took a few steps in Five’s direction, but stopped before she was well into his personal space. “I’m really sorry.”

“We’re all really sorry,” Luther said.

There were a few protracted seconds during which Klaus, and probably the rest of his family with him, waited for all hell to break lose. For Five to zap to the store, vengeance in his heart and ready for murder. Or for him to attack _them_ , for being there and the bearers of bad news. But Five’s reaction, to his credit, was pretty chill. In fact it was so chill that it froze the blood in Klaus’ veins.

“All right,” he said. He slid his hands in his pockets. “If that’s all, I’ll be in my room.”

He turned around and left the room. Klaus thought that the fact that he walked rather than teleported was a good sign—or he hoped so, at least. Only when the sound of his footsteps had receded did any of them allowed themselves to speak.

“That—went rather better than I expected,” Luther said, an uncertain note in his voice. He looked at Vanya. “Maybe you were right. Maybe it was better to just tell him.”

“Yeah,” Klaus said. “Or maybe he’s gone to his room to plot mayhem and murder.” 

Vanya scowled at him and Diego rolled his eyes. “You just _had_ to go and say it, did you," he said.

"Hey," Klaus said, palms open in a defensive gesture. "I'm just keeping our options real."

—-

Five didn’t go down for dinner. It meant Luther had to eat his dinner alone, because everyone had gone back to their own places, and Klaus was out on an AA meeting. At least it was what he’d said he was doing, but he really seemed to be serious about getting sober these days, if only so he could see his boyfriend from the Vietnam war again. Learning that Klaus had time-traveled to 1968 Vietnam would have been a mind trip if everything else about their lives hadn’t been so crazy already. As it was, it was mostly annoying that Klaus kept lording it over them with the fact that he was now ten months older. He claimed that Five didn’t count, since he was back in his thirteen-year-old body, although so far he’d wisely refrained from saying it when Five was within earshot. 

Luther planted his fork in the mess of overcooked pasta he’d made for himself and Five. The steady tick-tack of the clock on the wall was the only sound in the kitchen. He kept his eyes on the checkered pattern of the table’s wax cloth, trying not to focus on the lack of other people in the room. This was fine, absolutely fine. He was used to it. He’d eaten most of his meals on his own, back when he was still living with his father, after the others had left. For the last few years, Dad had gotten into the habit of eating in his office, Pogo had always taken his meals in his room, and Mom—Grace—didn’t eat. At least her cooking had been excellent, and way more appetizing than the sort of sludge Luther usually made. She, or what remained of her, lay in one of the rooms upstairs like a broken puppet. Now that Dad and Pogo were both dead, no one had the necessary knowledge to make her work again. On Diego’s insistence Five had tried his hand at it, but his efforts had yielded no results. Luther suspected he thought this was a waste of time. Five didn’t have the emotional connection to Mom that they all did—since they were about eight, he’d distanced himself from their robot mother and had stopped going to her for comfort like the rest of them. He still half-heartedly played along with Diego’s demands, but who knew for how long. 

There was a sound, something like a door creaking open, and Luther felt a surge of hope that it was Five joining him—even Five’s crankiness would be preferable to the soul-sucking crush of loneliness. Luther turned to the door expectantly, but it remained stubbornly closed. _It’s only your imagination playing tricks on you, dumbass. Remember how many times you were sure you’d heard the front door open, back then, and thought that one of the others had come back?_

Luther sighed and checked the clock—it was over half past eight, and Five hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. He was a growing boy, even if his mind was decades older. It was probably normal that he didn’t want company right now, especially not Luther’s company, but he needed to eat something. In no time, Luther had talked himself into arranging Five’s dinner on a tray. There wasn’t much he could do to make the food appetizing, but he carefully lined up the silverware and added a smiley face that he drew with ketchup, like Grace—Mom—would have done. Five would probably punch him for that, but if he felt well enough for annoyance then Luther would count it as a win. 

He made his way upstairs and when he reached Five’s room, he pressed his ear to the door and listened for a moment, trying to decide whether it would be perilous to go in. He couldn’t hear a sound. Was Five even in there? His heart beating faster at the thought that Five might have bailed, Luther carefully balanced the tray on one hand and used the other to knock on the door. He did it once, paused to listen for an answer, then knocked again.

The muffled sound of Five’s voice reached him. “Come in.”

Luther opened the door, bracing himself for anything. Five was sitting on his bed, legs crossed at the ankles, reading the worn copy of Vanya’s book that Luther and Diego had found in his stalker van months ago. He’d obviously brought it from the future with him and read it over and over again. Luther wasn’t sure how he could stomach reading it more than once, but he had to imagine that his perspective would be different if all of his family were dead.

“What do you want, Luther?” Five asked, not looking up from the book. “I could hear you puffing from behind the door.”

“I, uh, I brought you food,” Luther said, trying to gauge what sort of mood Five was in.

“Not hungry.”

“You should still eat.”

“If you tell me I’m a growing boy, I’ll stab you with the fork you just brought.”

Well, that was uncanny. Fortunately, Luther had become inured to Five’s death threats and it had been uttered with less bite than usual. He put the tray down on the nightstand, but instead of leaving the room he dragged Five’s desk chair for himself and sat on it. 

Five’s eyes flickered at him from over the book. It lasted only a split second, but it was the first time he’d looked at Luther since he’d entered the room.

“Weren’t you about to leave?” he asked irritably.

“I hate it downstairs on my own,” Luther said, then winced. This wasn’t what he’d meant to say. It sounded childish.

Five seemed to agree, because he said, “What are you, six years old?” 

But he put his book down, closing it without marking his page, and looked at Luther for real this time. His expression was pinched and tired, a crease between his eyebrows as he examined Luther with cold eyes. No kid ever looked like that; Luther didn’t get why anyone would think he was an actual child and treat him like one, but it happened every day. It wasn’t a mistake people did twice.

“I’m not in the mood to chat,” Five said, but his tone wasn’t as dismissive as his words would have suggested. 

“I’m sorry,” Luther said, guessing that he had his brother’s undivided attention for a few minutes and knowing not to waste it. 

Five looked away. “So you said already.”

“No, I mean—I’m sorry about what happened to Dolores, of course I am, but I’m also sorry I tried to hide it from you. I was scared that—”

“—that I’d go on a rampage? The thought has occurred to me.”

A flicker of worry made Luther lose momentarily track of what he’d wanted to say. Should he get ready to wrestle Five? This was unlikely to work as well on him as it did on Diego. 

“Oooo-kay,” he said. “Um—"

“You can relax, Number One,” Five said, amusement that was dry as bone seeping into his voice. His eyes drifted to Luther, then back to a spot on his bedspread. “I’ve decided against it. It wouldn’t bring Dolores back, would it?”

“No. No, you’re right. Anyway, I was afraid that… Okay, I _was_ afraid you’d react badly, but it’s also that I knew it would hurt you and I didn’t want that.”

“I’ve had my fair share of losses,” Five said. 

“I know. That’s why I didn’t want you to experience this one too. I know she was important to you.”

Five didn’t say anything for so long it became awkward. Luther shifted on the chair, which was too narrow for his bulk and whined under his weight, wondering what to say next. Maybe he should simply leave Five to his reading. Apologizing again would be pointless, and it didn’t look like Five was in the mood to join him downstairs for dinner. 

“You know that I never meant to leave, don’t you?” Five said, stopping Luther as he’d been about to stand up. “I never meant to leave all of you.”

“Uh, yeah.” Where did _that_ come from? “You got stuck in the future. We all know the story.”

“But when I… When I went missing.” Five reached out for Vanya’s book and put it down on his lap. His fingers traced the white lines that split the spine. “Vanya said some of you thought I’d ran away. That I wasn’t coming back because I’d found a better place.”

This had been Klaus’ theory, mostly, after he’d tried conjuring Five so many times he’d become reasonably convinced that Five wasn’t dead. _Maybe he just doesn’t want to see your face,_ Diego had said, to which Klaus had replied something vicious Luther couldn’t remember. They’d all been feeling raw, then, lashing out against each other at the slightest provocation. It had degenerated into a fist fight and Luther had been forced to step in. Klaus was the worst fighter out of them, but he was a biter, and Diego’s temper was brutal. 

Luther, like Vanya, had been sure that Five would eventually come back. He’d believed it until the belief had lost all substance and become mere stubbornness, just like his conviction that their father did the things he did for a reason. 

“It was better than the alternative,” he said to Five. “None of us knew enough about time-travel to imagine that you couldn’t travel back, so it was better to think that you were someplace nice than to think you were dead.”

Five had been neither dead, nor somewhere nice. Luther wondered whether he’d wished he were dead, sometimes. It must have gone through his mind at least once in the decades he’d spent stuck in the future. This wasn’t a cheery thought and Luther hated himself for having it.

“Is that supposed to be pasta?” Five’s caustic remark pulled Luther out of his thoughts. He was eyeing his dinner plate with skepticism. “Did you chew it and spit it out before you served it to me? Well, I suppose I’ve eaten worse.”

Either he hadn’t noticed the smiley face, or he thought this was the least of what was wrong with the food, but he grabbed the plate and started eating, not paying Luther any more attention. Figuring it was his cue to go, Luther exited the room as unobtrusively as he could. 

—-

Klaus’ coffee fucking sucked. Five had drunk water from stagnant puddles that tasted better, and he had no qualms saying this to his brother’s face. Any other day, Klaus would have replied something like ‘ _You have high standards for someone who survived on cockroaches_ ’ or ‘ _Make it yourself next time. I’m done enabling your caffeine addiction._ ’ Or some other tedious witticism. Today, he mumbled an apology and tried to get Five’s cup back from him, which of course Five didn’t allow. Luther gave him a look but didn’t protest when Five stole his coffee from him. Didn’t say, ‘ _It’s not going to taste better because it comes from my cup, Five!_ ’

“Did you sleep okay, Five?” Luther asked.

Character growth for Luther meant that he seemed to have switched which of their parents he wanted to emulate; instead of acting like Dad, he now acted like _Mom_.

Klaus said, “Maybe I can make another pot of coffee. Practice makes perfect and all that. Do you want me to make you another pot?”

Damn them. If only they would stop giving him pitying looks. He hadn’t slept much, but this wasn’t unusual. He’d pored over Vanya’s book, which he’d read so many times by now that he could recite entire pages of it to himself while his eyes glossed over the words. Back in the days of the apocalypse, he’d read the book so he could feel close to his family. It wasn’t a feel-good kind of book. There was very little fond reminiscence in it. But there had never been anything nice or easy about his life, so the book was more than adequate. It reminded him of what— _who_ —he was fighting for. Things didn’t need to be perfect or even good to be worth saving. 

Now that he’d escaped the future, now that he’d saved the world, now that he had his family with him, reading the book brought him back there, huddled in a makeshift shelter with Dolores, waiting for a storm outside to relent. It was a comfort read, one way or another, but yesterday it had given him no solace. His relentless mind had spun round and round again, going through a list of the same pointless questions that had nagged him through the years: what would have happened if he hadn’t left? Would he have died with his family? Would he have been able to prevent the apocalypse? Now that he knew more about what had caused it, his mind ran along similar lines—would he have figured out Vanya’s power? Would he have been able to make her feel less of an outsider? Would he have seen Jenkins for the cockroach he was and convinced Vanya of it? And so on and so forth, until all he wanted was to get blackout drunk so he couldn’t _think_ anymore. Unfortunately, since Klaus had decided to get sober not a drop of alcohol could be found in the house, and if it was hard to get coffee when you looked thirteen, getting booze was nigh-on impossible.

He knew that asking himself that sort of questions was nothing but self-inflicted torture. Things were what they were, and they’d turned out rather better than anyone could have hoped. So if Allison’s vocal chords were still damaged—if Pogo was still gone—if Mom was still out of order—if Diego’s cop friend was still dead—if all of them were still a smoldering mess of hot issues—if Dolores was… well. Five knew that it didn’t help anything to think about it, but sometimes his brain was his worst enemy. Dolores had always said so. Yesterday the whirl of thoughts had circled back to new, fresh topics of worry. Why hadn’t he heard or seen anything from the Commission? They’d been committed to seeing this apocalypse through. From a tersely-worded postcard from Hazel, Five knew that the Handler was dead, but as she’d said herself, she was ‘but a small cog in a machine.’ She should have been replaced and her successor should have picked up where she’d left off.

Too much thinking and too little sleeping had left him with a pounding headache in the morning, and all he wanted was a good cup of coffee, or, failing that, to be able to bicker with his brothers. Since none of those things were forthcoming, he saw no reason for him to linger.

“Five?” Klaus asked hesitantly. He gave the pack of coffee he held in his hand a little shake. “Coffee or not?”

“Don’t bother,” Five bit out. “I’ll just go to Griddy’s.”

He zapped away and back to his room to get dressed. He had about half-an-hour before his crochet class, which gave him enough time to swing by Griddy’s and get the coffee he needed to be fit for company. Crochet class was full of older women who had looked at his thirteen-year-old baby face and wanted nothing but to mother him. To their credit, they’d backed off easily enough once he’d made it clear he wasn’t interested in anyone taking care of him, and now they were undemanding presences who were always willing to help him improve his crochet skills. Crochet was soothing. He liked making things with his hands that had nothing to do with murder, and there were less safety hazards with it than with woodworking.

A few cups of coffee later he was feeling a lot better clear-minded and less like his brain was about to leak through his ears. The incessant buzz of thoughts in his head had quieted somewhat. Walking helped too, although he wished there were less people in the streets. Despite having the years he’d spent working for the Commission to get used to people again, he’d never liked a crowd. Too much noise, too many bodies, too much risk that one among the faceless mass would turn on him and try to kill him. Some would call it paranoia, but he preferred to say he had a healthy sense of self-preservation. He hadn’t survived all those years against abysmal odds for no reason.

Crochet class happened on the third floor of a three-story apartment complex, a building of glazed yellow bricks. The woman who had started it was a fifty-five-year-old widow named Samira Tavakoli, and the class was her way of dealing with solitude. Five could relate, though of course she wouldn’t get it if he told her. She thought he was much too young to know anything about solitude. 

Before entering the building, Five gave the street a cursory glance. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular; it was just habit at this point to regularly take stock of his surroundings. Most people walking down the street were in a hurry or lost in thoughts. None of them were paying him any mind, simply walking around him when he got in their way as though he were a lamppost. Drivers in their cars were similarly absorbed. Five looked further away, beyond the endless line of cars waiting for the light to go green. Across the street was a bakery—it must have been a good one, because the line had spilled out into the street, even that late in the morning. One person in particular caught Five’s attention: a man, dressed in a black suit and carrying a black briefcase. Before stepping into the bakery the man turned his head and looked across the street in Five’s direction. Was he looking at Five? It was hard to tell from a distance, and once he was inside the bakery the glare of the sun on the window made it impossible for Five to see inside the shop. 

Five shook himself. Not every person wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase was part of the Commission. It wouldn’t hurt to be careful when he got back to the house, just to be on the safe side, but he shouldn’t let this make him late for crochet class. 

A few women were already there, weaving colorful yarn around their hooks. They raised their heads from their work to greet him as warmly as if he were their long-lost grandson. He never talked much to them about anything that wasn’t crochet, so such welcomes always confounded him. They were probably just being polite, and since they hadn’t been raised by Reginald Hargreeves, their efforts came across as much more amiable than anything Five could muster.

“Are you all right, Five?” Samira asked, her dark brows furrowed into a frown.

“What? Yes, of course I am.”

“You just look—”

What did he look like? He hadn’t thought he looked any different from usual. Luther and Klaus had fussed over him because of what had happened yesterday, but surely other people couldn’t tell anything from one look at him.

“I’m just irritated because I have a problem with my crochet,” he said, sitting down at his usual spot on the ottoman and getting his work-in-progress out of his bag. 

They talked about crochet for a moment and it was a blessing to focus on a problem that was easy to solve. Ruth, Maisy and Ronna, the other women from the group, chimed in with their own pieces of advice and no one else asked him how he was doing.

“You never said who this was for,” Ronna said, pointing at the yarn on Five’s lap.

By now it was starting to look like what it was supposed to be, a child-sized dress made of orange yarn. He’d decided on the color after deftly interrogating Allison, who didn’t know what he’d needed the information for.

“This is for my niece,” he said, coiling yarn around his hook.

“Oh, how lovely! How old is she?”

Five didn’t immediately answer, focusing on his crochet. He was a quick learner, but he wasn’t quite skillful yet with a hook—not to do crochet, anyway, because he could think of a few creative ways to use one to maim or kill—so it demanded a lot of his attention. He could feel the other women listening, as he’d never shared anything personal with them before and he knew they had to be curious. Five didn’t like people being curious about him or his family, but he supposed there should be no harm in telling them Claire’s age.

“She’s six,” he said. 

“She’s lucky to have such a thoughtful uncle,” Maisy said. “She must be very fond of you, seeing that—”

She probably had been about to say something like, _‘seeing that you’re so close in age from her’_ , but fortunately stopped herself before she did.

“We’ve never met,” Five said. “I don’t know if my sister will let me see her, but I don’t think she’ll be opposed to giving her the dress.”

“Why would—” Five looked up in time to see Maisy share a look with Samira. “Why wouldn’t your sister let you see your niece?”

Five addressed her a sharp smile. “We’re a very fucked-up family,” he said. 

Maybe it was the shock of hearing him swear, but this marked the end of the interrogation on his family life and it was just as well. People thought they wanted to know, but they would probably recoil from the truth. 

The two hours the class usually lasted passed swiftly, and by the end Five was satisfied with how much progress he’d made on Claire’s dress. But as soon as he was back in the street, all of his focus turned to checking for a potential tail. He glanced at the windows of the shops, of the cars parked along the sidewalk, at every reflective surface he could find. There, a black suit, a tall, narrow silhouette, just like the man he’d seen before. About six or seven people stood between him and Five, but he was tall enough that he could probably see over their heads and keep Five in sight. 

Five stopped and pretended to check his watch, trying at the same time to get a better look at the man, but there were too many people around. He walked a little further down the street and then darted into a side alley, using his smaller size to hide among the other passersby until the last minute. He flattened his body against a sticky brick wall and watched the crowd for the man in the black suit, his hand curled inside his bag around the small pair of scissors he used for crochet. The minutes ticked by slowly as he scrutinized every one of the pedestrians who walked by the alley’s entrance. None of them was a tall man in a black suit, and after about ten minutes of this he had to come to the conclusion that the man was gone.

He went back to the house without noticing anyone else following him. Had his tail realized he’d spotted him? If he had, then chances were that next time someone completely different would be watching him. Not that Five had ever had a good look at the man. He’d been tall, thin, Caucasian. No distinctive features. He’d remained at a distance, merely watching. What sort of mission had he been assigned? Assassination? Simple surveillance gig? What was the Commission _planning_?

Back at the house, Five ignored Luther asking him how the crochet class had gone and locked himself in his room. He dug into the pile of notebooks that Allison had bought for him so he’d stop scribbling on the walls and started writing feverishly.


	2. Chapter 2

_The Commission’s possible goals:_  
\- _Monitor my actions in case I decide to act against the organization again or reveal their secrets._  
\- _Kill me to prevent me from doing either of those things._  
\- _Follow the original plan and try to bring about the apocalypse again._

Five stopped writing, tapping the tip of his pen against the page. The Commission usually got their information from local agents who lived in the time period and were undistinguishable from anyone else. The man who’d followed Five had been dressed like an assassin. He’d made no move to kill Five, but maybe he’d simply been reconnoitering. Five’s reputation preceded him, after all. Hazel and Cha-Cha had been among the best and they’d failed to bring him down. Why would the Commission wait for so long before sending someone, though?

Five looked at the third item on his list. It was the one he liked the least, but not liking it was precisely why he should consider it the most seriously. The original date for the apocalypse had passed, but he’d never been privy to the intricacies of the timeline. This had always been above his pay grade, even during his very brief stint in management. Therefore, it could be that the date for the apocalypse was less important than it happening at some point, which meant that they could be trying for it again, after letting enough time pass that Five and the rest of his family would drop their guard. Five’s grip on his pen tightened. He started writing again.

 _How would they try to make the apocalypse happen again?_ He struck out the sentence and wrote next to it, _How will they try to trigger Vanya?_ and underlined the last two words twice. He’d noticed he was being followed, but it didn’t mean he was the only one. Maybe all of his siblings were, and it was unlikely that they would realize it. They’d been trained to be superheroes, not spies or assassins. This was a skillset that only Five possessed. 

_How will they try to trigger Vanya?_

He pressed down the tip of his pen so hard that it left an indentation on the paper. It would be risky to attack Vanya directly, given how powerful and unpredictable her abilities were, not to mention counterproductive if they wanted her to destroy the world. They could try to kidnap her—cold sweat bloomed on Five’s forehead and his pen poked a hole into the page. Where was Vanya? He hadn’t seen her since yesterday, since he’d interrupted that fucking family meeting and she’d told him—

_Calm down. Think about this rationally. Do you really think that the Commission would kidnap Vanya and try to make her snap at the risk of losing a few agents in the process? Wouldn’t they first try something less dangerous for them?_

This had almost sounded like Dolores, although it couldn’t be. Five knew Dolores was gone. He had to do without her—had been doing it for a few months, but now he had no other choice. It had sounded so much like her, though. He must have absorbed enough of her advice over the years that his mind was able to conjure them on command. 

All right, so if the Commission wanted to make Vanya cause the apocalypse again, they probably wouldn’t act against her at first. They would need to make her emotional again on a scale similar to what had happened the first time. The first two times. Engineering a conflict with her family again sounded much too subtle and hit-or-miss for the Commission’s style. They preferred blunt removals to manipulation. Kill the right person and butterfly-effect the timeline into order, that was their M.O. Would they go for someone in the family? Was it why that man had been following Five? But Five could take care of himself, so this wasn’t the possibility that concerned him the most. All of them could defend themselves, but—

What if they tried to hurt Claire? Five stood up like a shot, the notebook and pen falling from his lap, and started pacing the room. Allison called her daughter every night at around 7 p.m. If Allison hadn’t raised the alarm, it meant that at least Claire had been okay yesterday at 7 p.m. If the Commission had meant to use Claire, they could have done it a lot sooner. It hadn’t occurred to any of them that the little girl could be a target, all the way across the continent. They’d thought her removed from the general Hargreeves insanity. And that didn’t account for the man who’d followed Five, although… Maybe the Commission planned to hit several of them at once for maximum effect.

There was a knock on the door of his room. “What?” Five snapped.

“Er, it’s Klaus. Your favorite brother?” Klaus laughed at his own joke. “Just came to tell you that lunch was served. In case you were interested.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well, you didn’t have any breakfast either—even though it’s the most important meal of the day, remember what Mom always used to say? So maybe you should—”

“I’m _working._ ” Five’s teeth gritted so hard it made his jaw hurt, so he forced it to relax. “And if Luther has been cooking again, then I’m probably better off not eating any of it. I’ve been almost killed by food poisoning often enough in my lifetime.”

“Okay! Untwist your underpants, old man. I’ll tell Luther to keep something warm for you. Come down when you feel like it.”

Five listened to Klaus’ footsteps fade away, his heart beating in time with them. There was a dropping feeling at the pit of his stomach. His palms were sweating. His breath was coming out a little too fast and he couldn’t get it under control. The part of his mind that was always detached, always analyzing, took a few seconds to identify what he was feeling. _Fear_. Not just worry, not despair, but absolute, blood-curdling fear of the kind he hadn’t felt in a long while. He’d stopped being afraid for himself years ago. He wasn’t afraid for himself. But by coming back and saving the world, he’d become once again a man who had something to lose. His hands curled into fists and he took a deep breath. This was mere distraction, all of it. He had to be able to think clearly. 

Should he warn Allison that her daughter might be in danger? _Think of the possible outcome. Unravel the thread._ If he did that, Allison would jump into a plane and head for California. She would be separated from the rest of her siblings, turning herself into the ideal target. Worried for her daughter, she wouldn’t think of her own safety. The Commission might very well be counting on that. Even if one of them went with her—Luther would probably insist—the result would be the family splitting up and that wouldn’t be good. They were stronger together, at least when it came to fighting off attacks. 

Five’s heart was pounding steadily against his ribs. He separated his mind from it, letting it become a background sensation. It was just something that was happening to his body. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have to let it distract him from the task at hand. He stooped to pick up the notebook he’d dropped, then changed his mind. He wanted to map out probabilities before he warned his siblings, so they could come up with a real plan instead of worrying themselves into a panic like headless chickens. He would work better if he could have all of it in front of his eyes, laid out on a wide surface. He went to rummage into his desk and retrieved a piece of chalk from one of the drawers. 

_Now get to work. And don’t stop until you’ve found a way to keep them safe._

—-

“I’m going to go out on a limb,” Klaus said, “and say that there might be something wrong with him.”

“No shit,” Diego said. “What gave it away?”

Klaus, Luther and he were staring at the walls of Five’s bedroom. They’d come with the intention of convincing Five to join them for a late breakfast after he’d stayed cooped up in his room for an entire day. The three of them, without really talking about it, had decided to go together in the faint hope that outnumbering Five would make him more susceptible to the suggestion. They’d been prepared to face Five yelling at them to leave him alone, but not to find what could only be described, in Diego’s humble opinion, as a Wall of Madness. All four walls of the room were entirely covered in numbers and symbols and words scribbled in a chicken scratch handwriting that was probably only decipherable by its author. Even the space under the desk had been defaced.

Five himself was sound asleep, his back against a bedpost and his legs sprawled in front of him. Powdery white stained his fingers and a piece of chalk rested in the middle of his uncurled palm, as though Five had simply been meaning to close his eyes for a second and hadn’t realized it when he was ambushed by sleep. He slept with his mouth half-open, a trickle of drool drying at the corner, and it would have been a comical sight if not for the context. It looked a lot like that time Diego and Luther had found him drunk at the library, which had also been only half funny. 

“What the hell is all that?” Klaus asked, stepping into the room and giving the walls a wide-eyed look. “Yeah, I can tell these are equations,” he said, presumably in reply to Ben, “but what are they _for_?”

Reflexively, Diego’s eyes followed the direction of Klaus’ gaze to the space where Ben must be standing. Of course there was nothing to see there, or at least nothing _he_ could see. Not for the first time, Diego had to quash a spark of jealousy at how easy it was for Klaus to communicate with their dead brother. All the rest of them could do was ask Klaus what Ben had said or wait for the times when Klaus managed to make him visible. But this was neither the time nor the place, so Diego ignored the feeling and went to kneel by Five’s side. He leaned over his brother, sniffing his breath, but it didn’t smell like alcohol. Five wasn’t drunk, then—just exhausted. 

“This is a probability map,” Luther said with such authority in his voice that it made Diego look up.

“A what now?” Klaus asked, quirking an eyebrow.

“He’s calculating probabilities,” Luther said. “I’ve seen him do it before. At the time, he was calculating whose death had the most chances to prevent the apocalypse. It’s what the Commission does, apparently.”

“Wait a minute,” Diego said. “You mean that you let Five run around, killing people to—”

“I didn’t _let_ Five do any of that. I… convinced him to explore other possibilities.”

“Okay, so,” Klaus said, waving a hand at the wall, “if Five was calculating whose death would prevent the apocalypse, what is he doing now? The apocalypse has been prevented, last time I checked.”

“I don’t know,” Luther admitted. “I can’t read any of it. I just know it looks a lot like what he was doing before. I’m not saying he’s trying to determine who to kill this time. Maybe he’s calculating probabilities for something else.”

“What’s going on in that crazy brain of yours?” Diego murmured to his sleeping brother. 

Only the soft puffs of Five’s slow breathing answered him. His hair was mussed like he’d combed his fingers through it too many times. Every time a breath escaped his lips, a strand that had fallen into his eyes quivered from it. He looked so achingly young in his sleep, without the usual cynicism and weight-of-the-world weariness pulling his features. He looked vulnerable in a way that put Diego on edge, like someone who could be hurt. It was all too easy to imagine a boy with that face stumbling among rubbles in a ruined world, alone and frightened. Things that he couldn’t change made Diego angry. Five looking like a fucking child made him want to go murder a punching bag.

“Hey, Luther,” he called, “get him into his bed. He’s going to wake up sore if we leave him on the floor.”

Luther nodded and bent down, but when he tried to slip his hands underneath Five’s body to pick him up, Five startled awake. His arms moved so fast they were a blur, his elbow slamming into Luther while the edge of his hand aimed for his throat. Luther shoved himself back, almost crashing into Klaus.

“Whoa, whoa, it’s me, Five, it’s Luther!” Luther shouted, his hand put forward in a ‘I’m an unarmed!’ kind of gesture.

Five froze. He was breathing in short pants, like he’d just come out of a fight. It took a few more seconds before his eyes properly focused on Luther. 

“Luther?” he said, blinking rapidly. “How are you—” He swept a look around, as though discovering his surroundings. 

“Can you explain the Wall of Madness?” Diego asked. 

The confusion on Five’s face settled into a frown. “It’s not madness, Diego, it’s _math_.”

“Same difference,” Diego said, just to see Five do that little irritated eyeroll of his. He hadn’t liked how lost Five had looked for a second.

“It’s a side project I have,” Five said. “I’m just—I’m figuring out something.”

“What probability are you trying to calculate?” Luther asked.

Five gave him a sharp look. Diego thought he was going to answer with a typical Five dismissal, such as, _none of your business_ or _you wouldn’t understand even if I used short words._ Instead he said, “I’ll tell you when I’ve narrowed it down to something more—to something we can work with.”

He grabbed a bedpost and hauled himself up, wavering on his feet. Luther shot out a hand to help him but Five slapped it away.

“You look like you need some sleep, buddy,” Klaus said. “Preferably in a bed. The Wall of Madness will be there when you wake up.”

“No, I need—” Five lifted a hand to rub his face, smearing chalk over it in the process. “It’s important. I need to figure it out.”

He looked at the wall as though it had personally offended him and muttered something under his breath.

“You know,” Diego said, “I’ve never been good at math and I can’t pretend I understand any of this—”

“Of course you don’t,” Five said, but it was absent-minded and his eyes were still focused on the equations covering the walls. 

Diego forced himself to unclench the fist he’d closed automatically. “—but I’m pretty sure you need a clear mind to do advanced math.”

“My mind _is_ clear.”

“Then why are you writing on your pants?”

Five looked down at the white numbers he’d just traced with chalk on the side of his black slacks. He looked at his hand like he couldn’t recognize it as a part of himself, like it he couldn’t believe its betrayal. As he stared at it the hand began to shake. Diego had just meant to make a point, but he was regretting mentioning it as Five’s silent contemplation of his hand went on and on until Diego thought his brother had forgotten they were in the room with him.

“Five?” Luther asked gently. 

“What?” Five barked, but the aggressiveness in his voice was tinged with disquiet.

“You should get some sleep. Even just a couple of hours will help. You know what Mom always said: sometimes when you’re stuck on something you just need to leave it alone for a little while and come back to it later with a clearer mind.”

Diego could still hear it the way Mom had said it, with the same lilt in her voice as when she’d recited nursery rhymes. She’d had a lot of those nuggets of wisdom to share, and Diego had always wondered whether they’d been part of her programming or whether she’d read about them somewhere. Her programming being such a mystery to them was part of why it was so difficult to fix her. It was frustrating Diego to no end that there were so many things he couldn't fix—Mom being broken, Patch being dead, Five's incomprehensibly messed-up mind. He really wished things would start going his way.

“Dolores also used to say that,” Five murmured. 

Diego, Luther and Klaus exchanged a three-way glance. “She sounds like she was a wise woman,” Luther said. He stepped closer to Five and held out a hand. “Come on, just a couple of hours.”

Five’s mouth pursed like he’d just bitten into a lemon but he dropped his piece of chalk into Luther’s large palm. “I think I’ll have a few hours of shuteye,” he said, like it had been his idea in the first place. “I’m getting a little tired.”

“Yeah, it’s probably best,” Luther said, taking it in stride.

“Now get out of my room,” Five said. “I can’t go to sleep with you three gawking at me.”

He toed off his shoes and lied down on his bed over the covers, turning his back to them. Diego, Luther and Klaus moved to the door, about to leave the room, but Five’s voice rose again and stopped them in their tracks. “Be careful,” he said.

“Careful of what?” Diego asked.

“If you’re leaving the house, be careful of your surroundings. Check for a tail, for—”

“Wait, what’re you talking about? What’s going on, Five?”

Five’s breathing had already slowed and deepened, and Diego’s question was met with silence. Luther put one of his huge paws on Diego’s shoulders and oriented him toward the door. Diego jerked his shoulder to shrug off the hand, but left the room on his tiptoes, his brothers close behind him. 

“We’ll have to keep an eye on him,” Luther said quietly as they walked down the hallway. “He’s not acting right.”

“That again, Luther?” Diego said, even though he didn’t really disagree. Contradicting Luther was as much of a reflex to him as breathing. 

It was gratifying when Luther’s response came predictably hot, “I’m not saying we should spy on him! Or, or plot behind his back, or anything sinister. Just to keep an eye on him. Check that he doesn’t lose himself to whatever that side project of his is. I don’t know what he’s trying to calculate, but it looks like it could bloom into an obsession.”

“Addiction,” Klaus muttered.

“What was that?” Diego asked.

“Ah, uh, I was just remembering something I’ve told Five before, that the apocalypse was like an addiction to him.”

“I don’t follow,” Luther said with a frown.

Klaus stopped walking. “Well, addiction is… It’s not just being addicted to one thing. It’s more like a way your mind has been warped.” He let out a short, self-depreciating bark of laughter. “This is kind of my area of expertise, so you can take my word for it. I thought that the way Five was obsessed with that apocalypse business was… I mean, don’t get me wrong, saving the world is a great lifegoal. Better than shooting heroine—I’m, like, fully aware of that. And I’m not saying I’m not grateful he came back to save us. It’s just that the way he went about it pinged me as an addiction.”

“But the apocalypse has been stopped,” Luther said. “The world isn’t in danger anymore—well, not that kind of danger. I’m fairly sure Vanya has things under control.”

“What happens when you can’t get the stuff you’re addicted to anymore?” Diego asked.

Klaus opened his palms, flashing the words ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ to the ceiling. “You find something else to get your high. Ben agrees with me about this, by the way.”

Diego suspected that Klaus sometimes said Ben agreed with him to give more weight to his words, even if Ben didn’t actually agree, but in this case he could see the sense in Klaus’ interpretation. 

“What do you think he meant when he told us to be careful?” Diego asked.

“Good old paranoia?” Klaus said with a shrug.

“Or he knows something he’s not telling us,” Diego said. “Just like last time.”

—-

“I think it has something to do with what happened to Dolores,” Ben said. “He’s been pretty stoic about it, but it must have been a shock. And you know how he deals with things that hurt him.”

“By throwing himself into something else until so he doesn’t have to think about his problems,” Vanya said.

“Yeah, and I doubt this has changed. If anything, that’s probably how he survived living on his own for so long.”

“I shouldn’t have told him,” Vanya murmured. Her mouth pulled down and her face became drawn with guilt. “I should have let him think that Dolores had left for somewhere else.”

Allison, who was sitting next to Vanya on the couch, lightly rested a hand on her sister’s wrist. “We can’t protect him by lying to him,” she said. “I think telling the truth was best.”

All of them were in the drawing room, save for Five, who was still sleeping. They’d been talking about their brother for the past ten minutes, and although he was as worried about Five as the rest of them Ben couldn’t help but relish the fact that he wasn’t a silent observer to the conversation. He could talk and his siblings could answer him. Klaus was slouched next to him in an armchair, his glowing fists pressed down to his lap. Beads of sweat pearled on his forehead and Ben knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long. Selfishly, he wanted to be able to ignore the fact that he’d noticed Klaus’ strain for a little longer. Just for a few minutes. In a few minutes, he would tell Klaus that he could let go. 

“Whatever caused it doesn’t matter,” Luther said. “We just need to—”

“—keep an eye on him, we know,” said Diego, who was sitting on the back of the couch and twirling one of his blades. “You’ve said it a million times already.”

Luther’s face puckered at the rebuke and Ben rolled his eyes. Allison flashed him a knowing smile and he felt suddenly embarrassed that someone had caught his reaction. A few minutes a day weren’t enough for him to get used again to people seeing his facial expressions. 

Whether Luther would have replied or not was left up in the air, because Five came in at that very moment. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair was tousled and there was a red mark on his cheek from his pillow. Shadows underlined his eyes like smudged charcoal marks. He stopped dead when he saw Ben, inhaling sharply. 

“Why did no one come get me when it was time for Ben?” he asked in a tight voice. 

“Sorry, Five,” Ben said, guilt filling him at the flash of emotion that had flitted across Five’s face. If he’d still had a beating heart, he was sure it would have been aching. “We wanted to let you sleep, and—”

Klaus let out an explosive breath, as though he’d been holding it for a while. Ben saw all the colors leech from the world around him. The stubborn, persistent chill of death took hold of him once again. 

“Sorry,” Klaus said. His face was colorless and his eyelids were drooping. “I tried to hold on.”

“It’s fine,” Ben said, trying really hard to sound like he meant it. Five was looking in his exact direction, almost like he could still see him. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow, it’s fine.”

Five sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Someone gets me a cup of coffee,” he said. “I need to wake up properly.”

“I’ll—” Vanya said, standing up.

“Klaus and I are going for a run,” Diego said suddenly. “You should come with us.”

“What?” Klaus squeaked, sitting up like a shot.

“I thought you ran in the mornings,” Five said. His forehead wrinkled as he frowned. “Or is it morning? I thought—"

“It’s early afternoon,” Diego said. “We didn’t go this morning, because—We got caught up in other stuff, but it isn’t good to mess with the routine.”

“I thought I was off the hook for today,” Klaus said plaintively. “And I’m _tired_. Do you think this is easy for me?” He waved a hand in Ben’s direction, like Ben was exhibit A in his demonstration. 

“All the more reason to build up your stamina,” Diego said. He threw the blade he was holding up in the air, caught it and then put it away. The whole thing had happened so quickly that Ben would have missed it if he’d blinked at the wrong moment. “Five, are you coming?”

“What?” Five’s eyes had been lost to some silent contemplation and he seemed startled at being addressed.

“Are you coming for a run with Klaus and me? Or are you afraid you won’t be able to keep up with your short legs?”

“I have work to do,” Five said, not rising to the bait. He might have not even heard it, because he looked like he was only half-listening. “I have to…” He trailed off, looking as though a thought had just struck him. “You know what, I think I’ll come with you. It’s better if I come with you.”

“You will?” Diego asked, obviously getting as much of a whiplash as Ben did from how fast Five had changed his mind. 

“Uh,” Klaus said, raising his hand, “can I leave my spot to Five?”

“ _You_ don’t get a choice,” Diego said, pointing his finger at Klaus. “I’ve said I’d whip you back into shape and I will.”

“Diego’s right,” Luther said. “Exercise is good for you.”

“It’s unfair that you two only agree when it’s time to gang up on me,” Klaus grumbled. 

“Five, if you still want that cup of coffee…” Vanya said.

“I think I’ll need all the coffee in the world,” Five said dryly, shooting both Diego and Klaus a look. His expression softened and he added, “If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all, I’ll just, I’ll make it while you get changed.”

Ben followed Klaus as he went to his own room so he could change into his running outfit. He listened to him complaining about being made to go for a run when he was already tired, about how much he hated wearing shorts, about the weather being too hot for running, about Diego being a sadistic bastard. He owed it to his brother for making it possible to talk with the rest of his family. 

When it looked like Klaus was losing steam, he said, “Don’t you think it’s strange that Five changed his mind so quickly about going with you? He was so obsessed with his calculations earlier, and now he’s cool with going for a casual run with you?”

Klaus had been in the process of slipping a clean t-shirt over his head, and he only answered once he’d pulled the fabric off his face. “So, what, you think our favorite assassin is up to something nefarious?”

“No, but—” He thought about what Five had said when as he was falling asleep this morning. “He told you to be careful. Maybe he wants to, I don’t know, protect you?”

“Protect us from what?”

“I don’t know.” Ben shook his head. “I don’t know, this was just a thought I had.” 

Klaus looked at him for a few more seconds, like he was waiting for him to elaborate. “We could spend all day trying to figure out our time-traveling brother and not come even close to clearing up the mystery.” He looked down at the plain t-shirt, the shorts and the sneakers he was wearing and groaned. “Actually, I’d prefer spending the day swapping theories about Five being a weirdo to running with Diego, but he’ll kick my ass if I try to skip it. So let’s go.”

“Hey, look at you, I didn’t even have to pester you about it,” Ben said, following Klaus out of his room. “That’s progress, man.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Casper.”

There was a quiet park, a ten-minute walk from the house, where Diego liked to drag Klaus when they ran. Ben rather liked it; he liked the people sitting on the lawns, the other runners who gave them friendly nods in passing, the squirrels scuttering up the trees. He liked watching a red-faced, sweaty Klaus utter curses under his breath the whole time they were running. Klaus was pretty quiet today. What Ben had said must have been playing in his mind, because he kept glancing at Five like he was looking for hints on what was going on with him. 

Five ran with a tight-jawed, focused expression, and if Klaus was looking at him, _he_ was looking at everything and everyone else—at the trees, at the bushes and especially at the other people in the park. He kept up easily with Diego, although Ben could tell that Diego was running more slowly than his usual. Ben ran behind them, his ghostly body feeling no strain no matter the pace. They weren’t talking but the silence felt comfortable, and Ben could almost pretend that they were four normal brothers running together, that no one had any reason to be worried about anyone else, that Diego and Five could see him too. That he was alive, and not just a shadow trailing his brothers.

They’d been running for about twenty minutes when Five shattered that illusion. Ben had gotten distracted looking at a little girl and a little boy, obviously siblings, who were playing ball on the lawn, laughing and calling to each other. He was thinking about playing ball in the staircase with his siblings when they were kids, when he heard Klaus shout and Diego growl, and was jerked out of his daydream. 

“Holy hell! Five, what are you _doing_?”

His brother had a man pinned to the ground; he was in fact straddling the guy, who was about twice his size, and holding a knife to his throat—wait, was that one of _Diego’_ s blades? 

Diego came to that conclusion at about the same moment. “Five, you little shit, give me my knife back!”

“Is that really the issue here?” Ben asked in a strangled voice.

“Yeah, Diego,” Klaus said, wiping the sweat off his face in the crook of his elbow, “is that really the issue here?”

People around them had taken notice of what was happening and were getting closer, although not too close, whispering to each other. Some looked alarmed, others exasperated at the scene. A few people were even sniggering, obviously finding it amusing—and yeah, from a certain point of view, Ben could see how the sight of a scrawny kid attacking a grown, heavyset man could seem funny, if you didn’t know that the kid in question had a substantial body count on his record and wouldn’t hesitate to slit that man’s throat. 

“What do you _want_?” Five snarled at the man’s face. “Tell me what you’re after!”

The poor guy looked about to swallow his tongue. His bulging eyes rolled in their sockets as he shot panicked looks around him, then they stopped on Diego and Klaus, wet and pleading. “Help! Help me! That kid’s crazy!”

Five roughly grabbed his face and forced the man to look at him. “Don’t talk to my brothers. Don’t even _look_ at them. I’m the one you should be focusing on, and I’m going to cut out your ears if you don’t start talking.”

Ben rushed to Five, but his useless ghost hands went through his brother. “Do something! Klaus!” 

“What do you want me to—um, Five? A word of explanation would be nice?”

“Diego, do something!” 

Diego couldn’t hear him, of course, but he still stepped up and said, “All right, Five, that’s enough, just let the man—"

“Stay back!” Five barked at him, with enough force that it made Diego hesitate. His eyes were wide and blazing, his nostrils flaring. “Let me handle this.”

“Handle _what_?” 

Five ignored Diego to focus on the man he was holding at knife point. “What’s the Commission after? Do they want to silence me? Is it the apocalypse? You can tell them that if they touch a _hair_ on anyone in my family, I’ll—"

“I, I don’t know!” the man stammered. The veins on his forehead were swollen and he was getting red in the face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Diego said, reaching out for Five.

“The Commission?” Ben said.

Looking at the man, he was indeed wearing the same sort of black suit that Hazel and Cha-Cha had worn. And next to him was something he’d dropped when Five had attacked him: a black, nondescript briefcase that was lying on its flank.

“Hey, Klaus—”

But Klaus had already moved away, kneeling by the briefcase and fiddling with its clasps. That caught Five’s attention, and Five turned to him and yelled, “For fuck’s sake, Klaus, you moron, don’t _touch the briefcase!_ ”

“Klaus, no!” Ben shouted at the same time.

Diego grabbed Five’s shoulders just when Klaus had managed to open the briefcase with a clicking sound. Ben cringed, anticipating the same blue light that had swept Klaus away last time. Five tensed, probably for the same reason, and he was so focused on Klaus opening the briefcase that he didn’t try to wrestle out of Diego’s grip. 

“It looks like a normal briefcase to me,” Klaus said, opening it wider to show the colored folders inside. 

Ben’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Jesus, Klaus,” he said. “You really need better impulse control. God.”

Five still hadn’t tried to get Diego’s hands off him. He wasn’t moving at all, staring at the briefcase in Klaus’ hands with a stunned expression. “I don’t get it,” he said.

Diego’s hands curled around Five’s shoulders. “Get off the man,” he said in a soothing tone of voice. “He’s not from the Commission. You can see that, right? This isn’t one of the briefcases. Just let him go.” 

He tugged at Five’s shoulders until Five moved away, slow and halting. The man he’d assaulted scrambled back to his feet and snatched his open briefcase from Klaus’ hands. 

“You’re all crazy,” he said, stumbling backward, his eyes on them like he was afraid one of them would attack him again. “Keep that kid on a fucking leash.”

He spun around and ran away like all the demons from hell were chasing after him. Ben became aware of the murmurs from the people who’d watched the scene. A woman approached hesitantly. “Is the boy okay?” she asked, although the look she addressed Five was closer to one you’d give a snake about to bite than a distressed child. “He looks—he doesn’t look quite right.”

Ben expected Five to reply with something biting, but Five looked, as the woman had put it, not quite right. The color had left his face and he looked both too young and too old, a bewildered little kid who was weary beyond belief. He was staring at the ground, where the briefcase had been dropped earlier, as though he expected a real time-travelling briefcase to pop up at any moment.

Klaus replied in his stead, “He’ll be fine once you stop staring at him like you’re at the zoo, lady.” The woman’s eyebrows shot up in indignation and her lips moved, but Klaus bared his teeth and she hurried away without another word. “Come on, guys, let’s go home. Hey, Five, are you okay?”

“I don’t get it,” Five repeated. “He was—he was following me. Us. I’m sure he was from the Commission.”

“Five,” Diego said, “you saw the briefcase. It was—”

“Give me a break with the goddamn briefcase, Diego!” Five snapped, wrenching himself from Diego’s hands and whirling around to face him. “I know what I—I _know_ , all right? I’ve worked for them for years. I know what I’m talking about. He must have hidden away the briefcase—”

“Christ, are you listening to yourself?” Diego said. “This doesn’t make a goddamn a lick of sense!”

“Let’s go, guys,” Klaus said. “We can discuss this at the house, but we should leave in case the guy decides to call the cops on us.”

“Come on, Five,” Diego said, but when he held his hand out, Five stepped away from his reach. He was still holding Diego’s knife. 

“Go home without me,” he said. He sounded distant, like he was speaking to them from somewhere else. “I have to check something.”

He turned away and the air around him shimmered. Before any of them had the time to react, he’d folded space around him and vanished. They all stared at the spot where he’d been standing for a long moment.

“He still had your knife, didn’t he?” Klaus said to Diego, who let out a muffled curse, clenching his fist like he wanted badly to hit something. “Do you remember those blessed years when we didn’t have to worry that Five would be running around, trying to murder someone?”

“Klaus!” Ben exclaimed.

“I doubt _you_ remember much of those years,” Diego replied dryly.

“Ouch,” Klaus said with an exaggerated wince. “Touché. And relax, Ben, you know I didn’t mean it. Much.”

Diego cast an odd look over Klaus’ shoulder. Ben had the feeling his brother was trying to determine where he was and resisted the urge to wave at him like an idiot. _Being dead sucks._

“We need to look for Five,” he said. “He isn’t in his right mind and God knows what he’ll do now.”

“Ben said—”

“Yeah,” Diego said. “I can guess what he said.” 

How were they going to find someone who had the ability to teleport and whose mind they barely understood? Still, they had to try. Ben was convinced that trying had to count for something; he would have quickly been driven crazy by Klaus if he wasn’t.


	3. Chapter 3

The first few jumps were just for the sake of getting rid of his urge to _leave, leave, leave._ Escape the looks his brothers were giving him, the sad, worried, pitying glances. Treating him like he was unhinged, like he didn’t know what he was doing, like he was a ticking bomb about to go off. He wasn’t _Vanya._

The uncharitable thought halted him in his momentum. He emerged in a back alley that smelled like piss and garbage. His chest heaved with rapid, short breaths, as though he’d been running. Jumping exhausted him, but not in the way physical exertion did, so this was a bit odd. He worked through it like he usually worked through pain, exhaustion or hunger, by forcing the discomfort out of his mind and focusing on what he needed to do. He had to analyze what had just happened at the park.

Either he’d made a mistake, or the man had switched his briefcase for a normal one before Five had caught him. This was against protocol, but protocol might have changed since Five had left. It _had_ probably changed, because the Handler was dead and they wouldn’t want Five to be able to use too much of the knowledge he had of their organization against them. If Five had made a mistake, it meant someone else had been following him and he hadn’t spotted them. If the man he’d attacked was truly from the Commission, then he’d probably called for backup by now. The jumps Five had just made should have been enough to lose a potential tail. What he needed to test now was how long it took before they found him again. 

He breathed through his nose, in and out, then wiped his sweaty hands on his t-shirt. He was wearing shorts and sneakers, and it made him feel unbearably young. Young and _stupid_ , because he wasn’t quick enough on the uptake to figure out what the Commission wanted. He was supposed to be the smart one in their freakshow of a family—if he couldn’t figure it out, then none of the six other idiots would manage it and they would all be doomed.

He took a step forward, aiming for the hustle and bustle of the main street, but stopped when he was washed over with a wave of vertigo. He waited until it passed, noting that his stomach was hurting too. He must have been hungry. The feeling was so habitual that he hadn’t paid much attention to it, but his body was once again thirteen and it needed food. Back when he was really thirteen and a new hand at surviving a hostile environment, he’d frequently passed out from hunger. Sometimes he’d laid down for hours and felt like he would never be able to get back up. 

_I’ll eat back at the house. A couple more hours won’t hurt._ He was fifty-eight now and his mind was stronger than his body. 

He walked out of the alley and into the street, forcing his steps into a casual stroll. He kept his awareness of his surroundings as its keenest as he walked, stopping from time to time to check the reflection on a shop window. He had an eye out for people in a suit, but not at the exception of everyone else. The Commission could be set in its ways, but if the man he’d attacked had really been an assassin, then someone in HQ should have had the thought that it would be smarter to switch to a goon in plain clothes. 

It wasn’t long before he noticed a woman, medium-sized, her blond hair cropped very short. She was wearing a pair of broad sunglasses and most of her face was hidden behind them, but he kept seeing her in the crowd behind him, always a good twenty feet away—far enough that it didn’t look like she was following him, close enough that she wouldn’t lose him. Five quickened his pace, then slowed down, took sharp turns into other streets, but she was always behind him, always roughly at the same distance, a pale face floating among a sea of other faces. 

Five mulled over what he wanted to do about it. He couldn’t confront her in the middle of a crowded street. His handling of the man in the park had been—well, he could admit that it had been less than ideal. But he was also concerned at how quickly she’d found him. It had been all of twenty-five minutes since the incident at the park, and he’d jumped around a few times, so even if she’d been following him before it should have been difficult for her to track him down. How had she _done_ it? It should have been impossible. Unless—

Five’s hands clenched into fists, his fingernails biting into his palms. He pulled space around him, poking at the spot where it was thin and flexible, allowing him to step in—

—and out. He stumbled and caught himself onto a mailbox. The world spun around him for a few seconds. 

“Are you all right, boy?” asked an old man in a quivering voice. The man looked so old and frail that a gust of wind would have probably knocked him off his feet. It was insulting that he seemed so concerned about Five’s well-being. Five was _fine_.

“Get lost,” Five said through his teeth, before he let go of the mailbox and strode down the street. 

It was a few minutes before he could focus properly and try to see if he could spot the woman following him again. There she was—same short blond hair, same sunglasses, same blue sundress. She kept the same safe distance between them. Five tried to get her to come closer, even backtracking at one point to force her hand, but she somehow managed to get out of his way without him seeing where she might have gone until he caught sight of her again behind him. Never close enough that he could see much of her face; if she took off those goddamn sunglasses, if she changed her hair, Five wasn’t sure he would be able to recognize her. And she kept _finding_ him.

He jumped again. And again, and again, but she always ended up behind him. He had to corner her on her own, get her somewhere quiet so he could kill her. The Commission would send someone else, but if he kept killing their assassins they should get the hint at some point, shouldn’t they? So he jumped to a deserted area—blocks of self-storage units, their iron blinds painted blue. He pressed his back against the blinds, small and thin enough that he almost disappeared into the recess created by the door. He waited, his hand gripping Diego’s knife. He listened for the footsteps that would echo in the empty spaces between the blocks if anyone came up, but he waited for a long time and the woman didn’t come. He tried again, jumping to a dark back alley, with the same lack of results. Had she stopped following him? Was she unable to keep up with him?

As soon as he was back to a crowded street, he could see her again behind him. She must have guessed what he was trying to do. She wouldn’t let herself be drawn to a place where he could have the upper hand. She probably didn’t have the same qualms he did about killing in the middle of the street. She wouldn’t be lingering after she’d accomplished her mission, after all. _She_ didn’t have to worry that her family would be impacted by her committing murder.

Short dizzy spells kept hitting him every few minutes. His ears were ringing almost continuously. He was reaching his limits, which must be what she was after. Once he was too weak to fight back efficiently, she would go for the kill.

_Amateur mistake. You let her hunt you down like an animal. Stupid._

“Give me a break, Dolores. I know I messed up,” he said before he remembered that Dolores wasn’t there, wouldn’t ever be there again.

He clenched his fists and focused on a last jump. He miscalculated the landing and emerged on the other side a couple of inches over the floor, tumbling to his knees. He was in his room. His first thought was a shamefully relieved, ‘ _I’m home,_ ’ before he was hit by a new, terrifying thought. _I’ve just drawn them here._ Only one thing could explain how that woman had managed to unfailingly find him even when he was jumping around, and that was if he had another tracker planted somewhere under his skin. He wasn’t sure _when_ they would have been able to do it, because his time at HQ had been short—unless it had been there all along, and the one he’d pulled out of his arm had been a red herring. Knowing when he’d gotten it was irrelevant. A tracker was the only explanation that made sense. And now they knew he’d gone home, knew that he was exhausted. Who else was at the house? He had to warn them—

He tottered to his feet, reaching for the side of his desk to pull himself up, which was when he realized that he still had Diego’s knife in his hand. He needed to find that tracker and dig it out. Since he’d just jumped, it would probably take a moment for the woman to pinpoint his exact location. He had a few minutes at most. 

He sat on his bed—or, well, his legs buckled under his weight and he dropped on his bed like a stone. _Where is it? Where did they put it?_ His fingers brushed the smooth skin inside his arm, over the bump of the scar from the cut he’d made months earlier to get the other tracker out. Would they have put it there again? Well, it made as much sense as anywhere else.

Five pressed the tip of Diego’s knife against the end of the scar that was closest to the crook of his elbow. The skin split easily—as he’d expected, the blade was sharp. Diego took good care of his knives. Five drew a bloody line over the scar tissue, like pulling a zipper down. Pearls of blood bloomed at the edges. It hurt, but Five knew the pain was nothing compared to what was coming next. He took a deep breath, braced himself, then stuck his fingers inside the wound, biting on his tongue not to cry out.

_Are you sure about what you’re doing? How much blood loss do you think you can withstand right now?_

“A bit late—to voice your—your concerns,” Five uttered through gritted teeth.

The pain was blinding. It took hold of his entire arm, squeezing it inside a vice of agony, with bursts of brighter pain as his fingers rummaged inside the cut. No tracker to be found. Five took out his bloody fingers, feeling lightheaded. Blood was dripping on his t-shirt, his shorts, his bedspread. He’d take care of the mess later. He had a lot of skin to try his luck on and very little time to do it. 

—-

Allison heard the front door fly opened and she rushed into the hallway, hoping that Five had come back. It was only Vanya, her violin case flung over her shoulder, breathless as though she’d run the whole way to the house. 

“What—” She bent down, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. “Luther called the music school, but the woman who had him on the phone wasn’t very clear on what’s happening. Where—where’s Five?”

Allison shared with Vanya what Diego had told her—how Five had attacked a man at the park, thinking he was part of the Commission, how he’d teleported away with one of Diego’s knives.

“The guys are now looking for him,” Allison said. Her throat hurt a little and she paused to swallow. She’d learned over the past few months how to pitch her voice so as not to put too much strain on her vocal chords, but with the stress of the situation she kept letting her control slip. “I stayed in case he came back, but he hasn’t so far.”

“How are they going to find him?” Vanya asked. “Do they have any idea where he might have gone?”

Allison shrugged. This was the one-million-dollar question. They had no idea what was going through Five’s mind and he had the ability to teleport. Chances were that they would only find him when he decided to come back. She opened her mouth to try and reassure Vanya, but was interrupted by a muffled sound, like something crashing to the floor. She and Vanya looked up at the ceiling.

“It came from upstairs,” Allison murmured. She padded quietly to the kitchen, grabbed a knife from a rack and motioned for Vanya to follow her.

“Is that really necessary?” Vanya whispered, jerking her chin at the knife in Allison’s hand. “It’s probably just Five coming back.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

Walking in front of Vanya was pure instinct, even if it made her roll her eyes. Vanya’s powers were the most destructive among their family, but her control of them was shaky and she had no combat training. Allison knew how to fight, and how and _when_ to be quiet. Together, they climbed the stairs leading to the upper floors, where the guys’ bedrooms were. Allison made almost no sound as she moved but Vanya’s steps were too loud, her breathing too heavy, and Allison felt a brief flash of irritation that she quelled ruthlessly—this wasn’t Vanya’s fault if she didn’t have the same training as the rest of them. 

Allison paused on the landing, squinting into the narrow hallway that divided the bedrooms. It looked a lot like it had before the house had been destroyed, with the wood paneling that ran along the lower part of the walls and the light fixtures at regular intervals, except that it was missing the explanatory pictures on fighting moves that had been pinned there for most of their childhood. At first the hallway was silent, but then Allison heard a muffled, pained groan that sounded a lot like Five. Behind her back, she felt Vanya lurch forward and extended an arm to block her sister’s path.

“Careful,” she said in a murmur. 

“It’s just Five!” Vanya said, although she was still whispering. “He sounds like he’s in pain. He probably needs our help.”

There were no other sounds, no fighting noises, which had been Allison’s concern. She stepped into the hallway, heading for Five’s bedroom. “Five?” she called cautiously through the door. Another pain-filled groan answered her, so she opened the door without wasting any more time. 

She hadn’t expected the sight that welcomed her and it stopped her dead on the doorstep. Five was sitting on the edge of his bed, a knife in his hand, blood running from both forearms. The blade and the fingers from both of his hands were stained with blood, but the part that really alarmed Allison was that he was currently using the blade to cut into the meat of his thigh. 

“What are you doing?” she yelled, too loud for her poor healing vocal chords. Right at the same time, Vanya gasped, “Five!”

The light bulbs from the overhead lamp and from the lamp on Five’s nightstand both exploded, making Allison flinch in instinctive fear, but she didn’t let it divert her attention from her brother.

Five looked dispassionately at his damaged lamp, then at his sisters standing in the doorway. “Allison, Vanya,” he said. His words slurred a little and his forehead was beaded with sweat that stuck his hair to his skin. “Wha—what’s wrong? Did anyone—”

“What’s _wrong_?” Allison repeated in disbelief, her voice hoarse and cracking. She wanted to rush to him, but the blade that was still stuck in his flesh made her contain the urge. If she startled him, if his blade slipped… the femoral artery was right _there_.

“Put down the knife, Five,” Vanya said in a soft, trembling voice. 

“But I’m not finished,” he said, frowning.

 _Finished doing what?_ Allison thought, but when she tried asking out loud her voice failed her. She had an idea of what he might be doing, an idea that thumped around inside her skull like a trapped bug, _he’s trying to kill himself, he’s trying to kill himself, why didn’t we see this coming?_

“What are…” she tried, but the rest of her sentence broke down in a rasp. 

“What’re you trying to do?” Vanya asked for her. 

“I’m looking for the tracker. I don’t know—” Horrified, Allison watched as Five pulled out the blade to stick his fingers _inside_ the wound. “—don’t know where it is… Have to be quick before she finds me…”

He let out another of the groans Allison and Vanya had heard from behind the door. Just thinking of how agonizing what he was doing must be made a painful shiver crawl over Allison’s skin, but she was also getting more confused by the second. Why did Five think he had a tracker in him? Who the hell was _she_?

_Questions later. Just get him to drop the knife._

“Five,” she tried again, the word painfully scraping her throat on its way out. “Don’t—"

What was she supposed to say? Play along? Tell him that he was being fucking crazy? What if he wasn’t, though—she’d thought that the apocalypse and the time-traveling murder agency sounded insane too, and he’d been right about that.

“It’s not there,” Five muttered, ignoring her. His fingers slid out of the cut, red and gleaming. The smell of fresh blood hit Allison’s nose. Five’s left hand, the one that held the knife, shook as it hovered over his leg, the tip of the blade grazing the skin as he looked for another place to cut.

“Don’t!” Vanya shouted, making the walls tremble with her cry. 

Five looked up, and Allison took advantage of his momentary distraction to launch herself forward and snatch the knife from his hand. His reaction time was off, probably because of the blood loss, and it was only when the knife had slipped from his grip that his head whipped to Allison and his hand made an aborted motion to get it back.

“ _Allison_ ,” he hissed, his eyes suddenly focused, but with a glint of madness in them. “Give. It. Back. It’s _important_.”

Allison took a few hurried steps back, which forced Five to stand up so he would keep her within reach. Or at least try to stand up—blood spurted from the fresh wound on his thigh and the leg shook, buckling under him. Vanya stooped down to catch him as he fell, and he slumped against her as though he’d fainted. He was as tall as Vanya and she faltered under his weight.

Allison looked around, a little frantically, for somewhere to put down the blood-stained knife she was holding. She’d seen her share of blood before—she’d seen gruesome injuries, she’d seen people die. But something about the fact that it was _Five_ ’s blood, and that he’d done this to himself, turned her stomach in a way very few things still could. In the end, she just dropped it to the floor and went to relieve Vanya from her burden.

Five wasn’t completely unconscious, but he wasn’t far from it, his eyes half-open and rolling in their sockets. His hands batted at her, trying to push her away and smearing blood on her silk blouse; there would be no saving the blouse, but it didn’t matter. He was leaning heavily against her and it made her acutely aware of the size difference between them. She didn’t usually regard him as small or young—he was too cynical, abrasive and lethal for that—so it was a shock to _feel_ it.

“Get the first aid kit,” she told Vanya. Whispering it, but this time because she had no choice. 

She dragged him to his bed and lied him down over the covers. He moaned, much more loudly than he would have allowed if he’d been lucid. There was blood everywhere, spreading in sticky, glistening patches on his clothes and on the bedspread.

“Five? Five!” she called in a hoarse whisper, slapping his cheek lightly, overwhelmed by the biggest feeling of déjà-vu ever. He’d been infuriating as a kid—smug, impatient, a goddamn know-it-all, and surprisingly thoughtful sometimes—but now he had to go and be heart-breaking as well as infuriating.

“Here it is,” Vanya said, suddenly popping up at Allison’s back. “I, uh, I raided the bathroom cabinet, and—here.”

She dumped an armful of disinfectant, bandages and gauze pads on the beds, and Allison started patching up Five while Vanya looked over her shoulder. He was mostly unresponsive now, which made her work easier since she doubted he would have been so cooperative if he were awake. She didn’t like how pale he was, though, or how shallowly he breathed, and a pliant Five just felt wrong. The cuts were cleanly made—Diego liked his knives sharp—but deep, which made sense if he’d put his fingers into each of them. How many more cuts would he have done if Allison and Vanya hadn’t showed up? She didn’t want to think about it. She cleaned the cuts and bandaged them as well as she knew how, and wished that it didn’t feel like she should be doing more.

Faint sounds of voices and doors banging reached them. “Allison? Vanya?” Luther bellowed from downstairs. 

“Can you go see…” Allison asked Vanya, gesturing at her throat to signify that she wasn’t up for lengthy explanations right now.

Vanya’s face got a pinched look that Allison belatedly recognized as guilt, even though it hadn’t been Allison’s intention at all to make her feel bad. Commenting on it would only make it worse, so she just gave Vanya what she hoped was a friendly smile, albeit a bit strained by the current circumstances. 

Vanya left the room quietly, gently closing the door behind her like you did in a sick person’s room. Allison heard Five mutter something indistinct and directed her attention back to him. He was waking up, although it looked like a struggle. His eyelids fluttered rapidly, his face scrunched up in discomfort. He groaned and smacked his lips, then opened his eyes. They focused on Allison remarkably quickly.

“Allison?” he said. He looked confused for a second, then his eyes widened in alarm. “How long was I out? I have to find the tracker—”

He was pushing himself into a sitting position as he spoke, even as it obviously caused him a great deal of pain. Allison’s hands shot forward, although she stopped short of touching him. 

“Five,” she rasped. “There’s—there’s no tracker.”

He glared at her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Where did you put the knife?”

“No, I checked,” she said, the lie coming out of her mouth fully-formed, without much input from her brain. “While you were unconscious.”

“You checked?”

“Yeah, I tried to feel for it, and—” Why hadn’t he thought of that himself, by the way? Why had he gone for the knife immediately? “There’s nothing.”

He seemed to be giving her declaration some serious thought. “Everywhere?” he inquired. 

Allison cringed inwardly at the thought of checking _everywhere_ on his body, but she nodded vigorously and that seemed to appease him. She tentatively reached out, aiming for a comforting pat on his shoulder, but when she made contact he flinched away from her touch and she dropped her hand.

“Sorry,” she said. “Want something for the pain?”

He shook his head. “Meds make my mind fuzzy. The pain is all right.” He dragged his hands down his face and leaned back against the headboard. “I need to think… How did she find me if there’s no tracker? What’s the Commission’s agenda? I don’t understand any of it. I need to—” He trailed off. 

She had no idea what he was talking about and was afraid to ask him. When he pushed his legs out of bed, obviously intending to get up, she reached out again to stop him.

“Take it easy,” she said. “You’re not well.”

“I need to work,” he said, gripping her arm. His feet hit the floor, but when he tried to stand up his face lost all color and he wobbled. “Shit,” he bit out under his breath. “Shit, shit. I don’t have time for this.”

“You’re hurt,” Allison insisted. He pushed against her, but he was weak enough that it was easy for her to absorb it. 

“Get out of the way, Allison. Get _out_ —” He angled away from her and space bent around him. _Damn it, Five!_ Allison thought when he vanished, but then she heard a crash, and when she turned around she found him crumpled in a heap on the floor a few feet from her.

She mouthed his name and hurried to his side. Blood was already seeping through his bandages. She had to help him up, because he was having trouble coordinating his limbs well enough to stand. 

“Allison,” he said. “You have to rumor me.”

“What?”

“I can’t think clearly like this.” He closed his eyes and breathed through his nose. “I _have_ to think clearly. I can’t, I can’t make sense of anything but if you—if you rumored me into having a clear mind, then I know I could get to the bottom of it.”

“No way.”

“It’s to protect our _family_.” He looked at her, his eyes burning intensely. “Our brothers and sister—and Claire, too.”

That mention of Claire’s name made Allison tense, as had probably been Five’s intention. _Asshole_. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I’ve been followed. By the Commission. I don’t know if I’m the one targeted, or all of us—or if they want to get another shot at the apocalypse.”

A shiver ran down Allison’s spine as she listened to him. When she’d found him earlier all bloodied, using a knife on himself, he’d looked batshit insane, but now he sounded chillingly coherent.

“But the guys said…” she tried. 

“They know _nothing_ ,” Five snapped. “They haven’t seen what I have.” He wavered on his feet and his grip on her arm tightened as he regained his balance. “Damn it.”

“Just get some rest, and we’ll talk about it with the others later.”

“Later might be too late! Either help me or get out of my way.”

What if the Commission was really out there, trying to trigger the apocalypse again? She had very little knowledge of them and how they worked, so for all she knew it was possible. But even if Five was right, he was in no state to do anything about it at the moment, and she wasn’t about to mind-control him so he could push himself even harder. He didn’t need her to make it easier for him to override the clear signals his body was sending him.

“No,” she said. 

She would have elaborated, but her throat pained her too much after all that talking. Instead, she tugged at his shoulders, wanting to steer him back to the bed, but he resisted her and tried to pull away from her grip. It quickly dissolved into wrestling, the half-serious kind they’d done as children, when tensions ran high and they needed an outlet, but still didn’t want to hurt each other for real. Five winced when Allison accidentally took hold of one of his wounded arms, but that only made him struggle harder.

“Stop it, Five,” Allison said, even though she knew it was useless, even though Five had never listened to anyone when he was like that. _You’re going to hurt yourself_ , she wanted to say, but this obviously wasn’t any sort of incentive to Five.

He tried to jump again, stubborn prick that he was. He gave her a shove, harder than she’d thought him capable of at the moment, which made her trip over the bunched-up edge of a rug and fall ungracefully on her ass. Five only managed to jump a few feet away, and when he reappeared he stumbled backward, hitting his head against the corner of his desk.

“Five!”

She saw him catch sight of the knife she’d dropped earlier on the floor. He narrowed his eyes like he was trying to gauge the distance and how quick he’d need to be to get it before Allison could get to him.

“Five, don’t—”

He didn’t bother getting up, just scurried on his hands and knees, his arm extended in front of him.

“ _I heard a rumor that you fell asleep!_ ”

He collapsed face first on the floor, sprawled like a star fish. Allison looked at him for a long moment, unable to move, her heart pounding too fast. She tasted blood at the back of her throat and the pain was greater than it had been in a long time. 

The door flew open and Vanya appeared, the worst possible person to show up at that moment. She looked at Five, unconscious on the floor, then at Allison, and at the face she made Allison knew that she must have heard her rumor.

“What did you do?” she said with a hard expression that Allison had only ever seen on her face once. 

“He wanted… me to rumor him… into… clear mind.” God, this felt like talking through crushed glass. “Didn’t want to.”

“So you rumored him anyway?”

“The knife.” 

Allison gestured at the bloody knife at Vanya’s feet. She wanted to explain more, but it hurt so much to talk, and also she wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t sound like she was justifying herself. She knew how it looked to Vanya—like Allison would always find a good excuse to mind-control others. And maybe she wasn’t wrong about that. Allison was still trying to figure it out herself. Was she fundamentally _wrong_ for being born with that power? Were there no circumstances where using it was justified? Would it have been better to knock Five out?

She made another attempt at talking that ended in a pathetic croak and Vanya’s icy expression melted away. Allison felt a spark of frustration, because she knew that guilt over Allison’s injury was a big part of what was making Vanya back down, and she hadn’t meant to guilt-trip her sister. _I don’t want you to keep stewing in guilt because of what happened. I just don’t want you to think that I’m a bad person._

Vanya sighed. “Well, I guess sleeping is the best he can do right now. Help me get him back on the bed,” She bent down to lift Five. “Why did he have to get so tall?” she mumbled.

Allison snorted a laugh and got to her feet. She and Vanya carried Five back on his blood-stained bed, took off his shoes and dragged the covers over him. Allison had watched hours of the surveillance tapes their father had taken of them and she knew Five was never so still and quiet in his sleep. 

“Sometimes when I look at him,” Vanya whispered, her eyes on Five’s sleeping form, “when I see that face from seventeen years ago, it brings me back. Back there, back when we were children.”

While Vanya looked at Five, Allison looked at her, feeling familiar regret and sadness overcome her. If she had Five’s time-travel ability she would do all of it over, be a better sister to Vanya, and to her brothers too. Be less obsessed with things that had turned out to be unimportant. But time-travel had done Five no favor and she had to live with the way things were. 

“Vanya,” she said, the name slashing the inside of her throat.

Vanya tore her eyes away from Five with visible effort. “Not all of it was bad,” she said, then graced Allison with a tiny smile. “Let’s get down to talk with the others.”

—-

Five was running. 

It felt like he’d been running for a very long time, probably most of his life. He was tired, so tired, but he knew that he couldn’t stop because if he did, something bad would happen. Not to him, but to his family, which was simply unacceptable. So he ran. He was thirteen and he ran, drunk on freedom and on his own power. He ran, the ruined buildings from the familiar street burning around him as he rushed to the Academy, thinking ‘ _please, please, please_.’ He ran from one dead body to the other, the adult faces of his siblings gray with dust and ashes. 

He was fifteen and he ran, intoxicated for the first time and convinced that all the corpses on Earth had risen and were chasing him. He was twenty-two and he ran, trying to escape one of the tornadoes that regularly wrecked the continent. He was thirty-five and he ran, trying to get out of a building before it collapsed on his head. He was fifty and he ran after one of his targets that had slipped through his fingers. He was fifty-eight going on thirteen and he ran, away from people who wanted to kill him and toward his goal of preventing the apocalypse so that he could finally, _finally_ rest.

Five woke up with a jolt and realized he was running. A car zapped past him with a deafening honk. He was in a street, running along the sidewalk, not quite in the middle of the street but away enough from the curb that cars had to swerve to avoid him. He staggered backward until he was on the sidewalk, away from the traffic. His heart was hammering, his hands shaking. 

_Where am I?_

He couldn’t recognize the street, but it was busy, the sidewalks swarming with a continuous flow of pedestrian, incessant, noisy traffic on the road. The buildings were tall and impersonal brick constructions, probably offices and apartments. Five took one long, trembling breath, then another. 

_How did I get there?_

He must have jumped, but he couldn’t remember where he’d been going, who might be after him. _I was running_. He started walking, following the flow of people going up the street. His feet were cold. He looked down on himself and saw that he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Both of his arms were bandaged and the bandages were spotted with crimson. They hurt, and his leg hurt too, but the pain was distant and unimportant. He had to figure out where he was, what he’d been doing and what he should be doing now. There was always something to do.

His mind was still foggy, but he wasn’t overly worried about that. It happened, sometimes—exhaustion, hunger, fever, alcohol were all things that could temporarily addle his mind, but he always pulled himself together in the end. He didn’t really have a choice. 

The only thing he knew for sure right now was that he had to keep moving. Someone was after him and he had a long way to go before he could rest. 

—-

They talked in circles for what felt like hours. Vanya, who’d spent most of her childhood observing her siblings, had noticed before that if you put more than two of them in a room to discuss a problem, chances were that they would drive each other crazy before they got to a solution. 

Diego, Klaus and Ben—whose words were relayed by Klaus—all said that the guy Five had attacked in the park was most definitely not an assassin. Allison said that when she’d talked to Five, he’d seemed staunchly convinced of the opposite, or at least that the Commission was after him. 

“He was right about it before,” Luther offered as his contribution to the conversation. 

“For the hundredth time, Luther,” Diego said, “we looked at the fucking briefcase and it was just that, a briefcase! Not a time-travel device. And let’s say the guy was an assassin, let’s say he was trying to hide the briefcase—why would he go through the effort of finding another ordinary briefcase to use as a prop? Huh? If he was really tailing Five, then wouldn’t he try to look less like a hitman from the Commission?”

Vanya didn’t take much part to the discussion. If Five was right and the Commission was, as he’d said to Allison, trying to get the apocalypse on the move again, then they would try to use her again. She wasn’t the same naïve girl who had bought into Leonard—Harold—’s bullshit and who had no idea of what she was capable of, but they must have alternate ways of making her do what they wanted. What if they tried to kidnap her? What if they hurt her brothers and sister to get to her? No wonder the thought had driven Five mad. 

Vanya lifted her feet up to the sofa she was sitting on, hugging her knees against her chest, her siblings’ conversation no more than a background noise to the buzz of her thoughts. Thinking about the Commission trying to make the apocalypse happen again inevitably brought back memories of playing the violin at the Icarus Theater, white, blinding energy swirling around her. The memories were dim, remote, as though they were part of a dream rather than something that had really happened. The worst thing about them was that they weren’t _bad_ , per se. Quite the contrary, in fact. Few things in her life had ever felt as good as wielding that much power had. Then, one memory triggering another, she thought of Pogo, speared by the antlers on the wall, guilt warring with anger as the memory played in her mind. She still felt so much anger, probably more than she should have.

Vanya dropped her feet down to the floor and stood up. “I’m going to check on Five.”

They all stopped talking and looked at her. There was nothing hostile or dismissive about any of them, only some inquisitiveness, but it was still a bit uncomfortable to be the center of attention like that. Allison opened her mouth, but then closed it without saying anything, either because it still hurt her to talk or because she’d thought better of it. Vanya didn’t want to think about what had happened earlier, when Allison had rumored Five, or when Allison had flinched because Vanya had made the lightbulbs explode.

“We don’t know when he’ll wake up and what will be his state of mind when he does,” she said. “We don’t want him to… freak out.”

Everyone cringed at the thought of what Five freaking out might involve and Vanya left them to their debate on what to do if the Commission was really making a come-back. As she made her way upstairs her step became quicker until she was trotting up the stairs, her own words hitting her all of a sudden. Five could have woken up already and seen that he’d been left alone. Whether he was right about it or not, he seemed to think that they were all in danger. What would he do if he woke up, in pain, maybe confused, and couldn’t find them?

She managed to contain her sense of urgency when she got to Five’s bedroom, and instead of flinging the door open like she wanted to, she pushed it gently.

“Five?”

He wasn’t in his bed. Vanya stared at the empty bed for a moment, before she shook herself into action. She checked under the bed, under the desk, into the closet, behind the curtains. Five wasn’t anywhere. 

“Five!” she shouted, anxiety building up inside her chest and crushing her lungs. “Five!”

Energy surged out of her and the door slammed shut. The glass panes on the window shook. She breathed, focused on her heartbeat and on slowing it down. She stilled her hands, tried to empty her mind. Her power was a ball of heat pulsing behind her ribs, a foreign thing hiding inside of her. _‘Don’t think of it as a thing_ ,’ Ben had told her. _‘Good or bad, it’s just a part of you.’_

The curtains fluttered like under a light breeze. Better, much better. Looking again at the bed, she saw that the covers hadn’t been pushed back. They were bunched up, like they’d collapsed onto the mattress when Five’s body had vanished.

Footsteps pounded in the stairs and into the hallway. Diego was the first to burst into the room. “Vanya? Are you all right? What—” His eyes swept around the room. “Where the hell is Five?”

“What’s going on?” Luther asked over Diego’s shoulder. He was so broad that he blocked the doorway entirely, but Vanya would bet that Allison and Klaus were right behind him. 

“Five is gone,” Vanya said, proud of calm she sounded. _He’s gone_ again.

A storm of exclamations welcomed her announcement. They reconvened in the kitchen, arguing all the way down. “He must have jumped,” Luther said.

“Yeah, thank you, Sherlock,” Diego said.

“Sleep jumping,” Luther insisted. “He used to do that as a kid, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” Klaus said laughingly, “I remember that one time, he popped into the garden and slept curled up around the tree for the rest of the night, and in the morning he said—Well, okay, Ben, I know it’s serious and Five could be in trouble. I was just trying to lighten the mood!”

“Allison said that he had trouble jumping right before he passed out,” Vanya said. “He can’t be far.”

She’d started absentmindedly making coffee as she talked. Having something to do with her hands made her feel better, and, well, Five liked coffee. Loved it to the point of addiction. _Are you trying to lure him back home again, like he’s a stray kitten? Last time it only took seventeen years._ She put down the pack of coffee she’d just retrieved from a cupboard, leaning against the counter.

“Hey, Vanya, Five will be all right,” Klaus said. He was sitting on the kitchen table, his feet on one of the chairs. “He’s survived starvation, lack of electricity and running water, diseases… and, I don’t know, whatever the fuck else he had to go through in the apocalypse. He’s been half-insane probably for decades and has kept functioning right along with it. He’s tougher than all of us combined.”

“Yeah,” Vanya said, trying to smile at him. “I’ll feel better once we’ve found him.”

“Like you said, he must be somewhere close to the house,” Luther said. “If we split up and divide the area, we should find him quickly. We can do two groups, three groups?”

“Ben and I can be a group,” Klaus said. “So we can do three groups of two.”

“Yeah, okay.” Luther’s eyes rested on Diego, Allison, and then Vanya, obviously going through the different combinations in his head. Vanya and Allison, Luther and Diego; Vanya and Diego, Luther and Allison. Vanya and…

“I’ll go with you,” Vanya said. “Then Allison and Diego can pair up.”

“Oh. Are you…” She could tell he was going to say, ‘are you sure?’ and held his eyes defiantly until he changed it to, “All right. Let’s meet up here in one hour. If we haven’t found him by then, we’ll extend the research perimeter. If that’s okay with everyone?”

They all nodded, a serious, somber mood that Vanya wasn’t very familiar with taking hold of the group. She’d come to think of it as their ‘mission mode,’ something that she—Number Seven, ever relegated to the sideline—wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see when they were younger. As a child, she’d always imagined the missions as a fun time she was excluded from. She knew better, now. 

The zone they decided to search covered a one-mile radius around the house. Five’s jumping limit—how far he could go in one jump without being incapacitated afterward—was of a few miles, but it was a safe bet that he had been incapable of jumping that far. Vanya and Luther got the northern zone, which contained Griddy’s, the Super Star, and a few other of their old haunts from when they’d snuck out of the house as kids. Vanya hadn’t liked even walking through it after she’d left home. The fact that it was populated by mostly good memories had made everything else about her childhood feel even more bitter in comparison. 

Vanya and Luther walked in silence. They had a good reason for ignoring each other; they were supposed to be looking for Five, and it was easy to be so entirely focused on trying to spot Five’s dark head among the passersby that they could pretend to be two strangers who just happened to be walking side-by-side at about the same pace. Except that they didn’t have the same stride at all and Luther was definitely walking slower for her sake. 

Sometimes she snuck a glance at him, although she didn’t really have to be sneaky because he was so much taller than her that from his vantage point he probably couldn’t see her looking. She looked at his big, bulging arms, and remembered them wrapped around her. She often thought about this when they were in the same room. She knew he knew, because he’d noticed where her eyes lingered and it made him go very quiet and awkward. What he _didn’t_ know, was that she wasn’t always thinking of the moment when the hug had changed into a choking hold—just as often she thought of how safe, how shielded from everything she’d felt for a few seconds, swallowed into his big embrace. How badly she wanted to feel like this again. It drove her mad that she didn’t know whether Luther had meant it, even just a little.

“Why did you want to be paired up with me?” Luther asked, breaking the trail of Vanya’s thoughts.

She looked away from him and directed her gaze far in the distance, trying to see if Five was anywhere around. “Why not?” she replied.

“I don’t know, I thought that—that maybe you wanted to tell me something.”

That surprised her, because he might actually be right, and that would mean that in that moment, he had understood her better than she’d understood herself. It wasn’t that they’d never talked about what had happened. Many lengthy family meetings had centered around rehashing that sequence of events. Luther had apologized, several times, and she was almost sure he’d meant it at least the last few times. He’d also tried to explain his actions, but she hadn’t wanted to hear about how he’d thought of her as a threat to be contained, partly because some dark, masochistic part of her couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t been right. She’d almost destroyed the world, after all. She’d killed Pogo.

“I don’t, I. I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Oh, okay.”

The crowd was getting thicker in that part of the street, now that they’d reached a busier shopping area. Crowds generally meant that Vanya would get bumped into left and right, like the ball in a pinball machine, but walking next to Luther mitigated the problem as people tended to give him a wide berth.

“If you could do over one thing in your life,” she asked, “what would it be?”

He was silent for a long moment. “It feels like a trick question. How can I say anything but—”

“All right, then what if you could do over anything _but_ that?”

“Then… If you mean big decisions and not smaller things, I guess I would leave the house when the rest of you did. What about you?”

“Oh, uh.” He’d surprised her again, but then she hadn’t had a real conversation with Luther in so long that she couldn’t remember the last one. “I guess I… I wouldn’t trust Leonard. I would believe Five when he told me about the apocalypse. I—”

“You only get to pick one,” he said. “Otherwise I have a lot of other options too.”

She couldn’t contain a little huff of startled laughter. “Sorry, I was cheating. Then I—” She hadn’t ceased looking around for Five as she talked and something caught her drifting eyes. She stopped and squinted at the other side of the road. “Hey, isn’t that Five over there?”

Luther stopped and looked in the same direction. “Yeah, it is. Thank God. But who’s that with him?”


	4. Chapter 4

Five wasn’t sure how long he’d been walking, but it was long enough for his walking to turn into limping. The pain in his leg had become all-consuming and he was now dragging it behind him more than he was using it, trying to put as little weight on it as he could. It wasn’t getting any easier to think—his thoughts were whirling fireflies that danced in front of him, only to elude him when he tried to catch them. He wanted to stop and take the time to dissect the matter, but there were too many people around for it to be safe. Sometimes the people tried to talk to him, but he ignored them, although the murmurs followed him like a bad smell. They were distractions, all of them. What he needed was to _focus_.

He was shivering, even though the sun shone brightly. _Blood loss. You really did a number on yourself._

“Shut up,” he muttered half-heartedly. His head ached from exhaustion. His arms burned with agony and the blood stains on the white bandages only kept spreading. “I had to do it, you know I did. I had to—”

Had to do _what_ , exactly? His recollection of recent events was still very spotty. He remembered Allison’s concerned face, her hands on him—he was fairly certain that she was the one who’d patched him up. He remembered using the knife on himself, which was how he knew that he _had_ to do it. Because he wouldn’t have done that until he had a compelling reason for it. He wouldn’t have just… would he? No, he wouldn’t have been trying to end it, because that was a cowardly thing to do. And he couldn’t leave his family, not again, because someone needed to watch out for them. What if the Commission went after them again?

_The Commission. There’s something that you’re forgetting and it’s about the Commission._

His head was swimming, making the ground feel like it was reeling under his feet, and he had to pause to lean against a lamppost. His hands were sweating and they left damp traces on the metal. 

“I don’t think I have a fever,” he told Dolores. “I’m not drunk either— _yes_ , I’m sure. Pulse is…” He pressed shaky fingers against the pulse point at his wrist. “A little too weak. I know, blood loss—you can lay off me anytime you want, now. I feel disoriented and there are holes in my memory. What do you think—"

“Five? Is that you?”

He whirled around, his fighting instincts surging to the surface and pushing back his pain, tiredness and confusion. He was unarmed, but a correctly applied blow could—

“Five!”

His hand stopped inches from the chest of a middle-aged woman. Dark skin, dark hair streaked with gray, a round, kind face. She looked awfully familiar.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, speaking rapidly in that way people had when they were frightened or uneasy. “I just saw you and you looked—Oh my god, you’re injured!”

Samira. Samira Tavakoli from the crochet class. Five lowered his hand, but even after he’d identified her as a non-threat, it took another moment for the rush of adrenaline to subside, leaving him bone-weary and on edge at the same time. 

“It’s fine,” he replied automatically.

But she’d now noticed that he wasn’t wearing any shoes and it only made her babbling intensify. “You’re so pale, you poor thing. What happened? Were you at a hospital? I should bring you back there.”

“No hospital!” Five said, hissing the words through his teeth. 

He’d jerked away from her without really meaning to and she raised both of her hands in a calming gesture. “All right,” she said in the sort of irritating soothing voice one used on a wounded animal. “I could walk you back home, then. How does that sound, Five?”

She was speaking to him like to a child, which she hadn’t done since Five’s first crochet class. He must be a truly pitiful sight and he hated that she had to see him like that after he’d worked so hard on making her forget his apparent age. She could help him get back home, though. He didn’t think he was far from it, but he had such a hard time focusing that it made getting his bearings a more arduous task than it should be. Could he trust Samira? Was her finding him when he was at his weakest really just a fortuitous encounter?

“Five!” someone else yelled.

Samira startled and looked over her shoulder, then positioned herself in front of Five as though she was trying to _protect_ him. A commendable endeavor, especially given the size of the person charging at them like a herd of buffalos. Luther’s large bulk would have made most people instinctively want to get out of his way, but Samira didn’t falter. Five, for his part, was overwhelmed by a strange wave of relief that left him weak at the knees, especially when he caught sight of Vanya running behind Luther, trying to keep pace with him. _It’s fine. They’re fine, I’m fine._

“Five!” Luther shouted again. “Where the hell have you been? We were—”

“I’m sorry,” Samira said in a clipped manner, “but who are you to this boy?”

That took Luther aback, and he gaped at Samira for a moment before he asked, “Who are _you_?”

He stepped closer, trying to look around Samira at Five, and Samira took a small step back, extending her arms in a protective gesture. Foolish, Five thought, but it would have been sweet if he’d really been a child in need of protection. He tried to speak but was hit by another dizzy spell that forced him to cling again to the lamppost. 

“Luther,” Vanya said, resting a small hand on Luther’s massive forearm. “I think you’re scaring her.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Luther said, hurriedly drawing back. “We’re Five’s brother and sister. We were just looking for him.”

“He’s injured and confused,” Samira said. “What happened to him? How can I be sure that he’ll be safe if I let him go with you?”

Luther reddened as the implication of Samira’s words dawned on him. “We wouldn’t—"

“Okay, that’s enough,” Five said, reaching for Samira’s elbow to make her lower her arm. “Samira, I appreciate your concern, but it really isn’t necessary. I don’t need anyone’s protection, especially not from my own family.”

“But—”

“I’ll see you next Tuesday.”

He walked around her with what he thought was a fair amount of dignity, given that his legs felt like rubber and a sharp pain kept shooting through his thigh, at least until he was a couple of steps away from Luther and he stumbled. 

“Five!”

Luther and Vanya were both immediately on him, holding him up. The feeling of their hands around his arms, on his shoulders and his back, was at once too much and oddly comforting. Something in him, a longing that he’d kept locked for so long he’d forgotten it was there, stirred at their touch and it made him shudder. He hated to be seen in that weakened state, but he hadn’t had anyone to catch him when he faltered since childhood. Dolores, for all of her wonderful qualities, only had one hand that she couldn’t use for much. 

“Let’s get you back home, okay?” Vanya murmured.

 _Home_. How long had he been trying to get back home? He’d aimed for it for so many years that he felt like he had become a goal rather than a person. He’d had to carve out all the parts of himself that weren’t necessary to survive, and he worried—or Dolores worried, whichever—that he’d accidentally gotten rid of something essential that he could never replace or recover. He wanted to go home, but did home want _him_?

“You okay?” Luther’s voice, rumbling in his ear. “You’re shaking. Do you want me to carry you? I promise not to tell the others.”

“No, no,” Five muttered, his face buried against Luther’s arm. “I’m fine, I can walk.”

He was tired, was all, and it made his thoughts wander down strange paths. He’d sleep it off, and then he would be able to get back to work the next morning.

_What work? What were you trying to do? It was about the Commission. Think, you idiot!_

“Shit,” Five said, pulling away from Luther’s reassuringly solid arm. “The Commission.”

“Five,” Luther said in his ‘I’m the reasonable one’ voice. “I don’t think that—”

He didn’t get to finish that sentence, because several things happened at once. 

—-

Even when she couldn’t speak much, Allison didn’t have any trouble conveying her disapproval. It was her eyebrows, for one, and the way they curved down, as well as the flat line of her mouth. As they walked the streets together, looking for Five, the silence between them grew heavy until Diego couldn’t take it anymore.

“Okay, if you have something to say, then just say it.” Allison responded by raising an unimpressed eyebrow. “Yeah, okay, I know that your throat is hurting. You don’t need to give me that look! And I _know_ that I should have been more careful with my knives. But Five did that thing, you know, where he teleports a thing and it’s just… Poof! How was I supposed to know he was going to steal my knife to attack some random guy?”

“Why did you have knives?” Allison asked in that hoarse voice that felt like sandpaper grating on Diego’s skin. “You were just going on a run.”

“I—with the kind of life I lead, I have to be ready for everything!”

“But not for your brother stealing your knife to attack a random guy, apparently.”

“Well, I don’t think anyone can plan for Five. Where the fuck is our pint-sized assassin, anyway?” He examined the buildings around him, trying to determine their location. Here was the Super Star, so that meant… “Shit. We’re in Luther and Vanya’s zone. We went too far up the street. Let’s backtrack, and—”

Allison tugged on his sleeve and he cut himself off. “Look, Five!”

Diego looked, and the first thing he saw wasn’t Five, but Luther. It was rather hard to miss Luther’s towering, hulking silhouette, even at such a distance. Luther was bent over Five, who looked like he was only standing because Luther propped him up. Diego heard Allison let out a slow breath and he felt its relaxing effect on his own body, the two of them exactly in sync at that moment. He hadn’t really been _worried_ —let’s be real, someone who’d survived forty years in a wasteland wasn’t easily taken down—but it was still good to see that he’d been right not to worry. 

“Come on,” he said to Allison. “Let’s join them.”

He looked right and left of the street for the right moment to cross. He was about to do it, confident that Allison would follow him, when she gave his sleeve another tug.

“Don’t you think that guy is acting weird?” she said, close to his ear so she didn’t need to strain her voice to be heard.

On the other side of the street was the back of the Super Star and its parking lot. Casually leaning against the building, angled so that he could look into the street, was a tall, lanky man wearing a dark suit and carrying a black suitcase. He seemed to be intensely focused on something, while at the same time trying to hide from view on his side of the street. 

“A man in a black suit,” Diego said. “That could be absolutely anyone.”

Five’s paranoia must be infectious, though, because he couldn’t stop looking at the man, and the more he did, the more the guy’s attitude felt suspicious. He could have been waiting for someone. He could have been doing some idle people watching. But he was looking in Five, Luther and Vanya’s direction, and that didn’t sit well with Diego. As Diego was trying to decide what to do, the man in the suit turned his head like something had caught his attention and looked across the street— _right at them_.

“Damn it,” Diego said. “He saw us. He’s going to—"

The man pushed off of the building and started to walk down the street, in direction of Diego’s siblings. His pace was relaxed enough, but a little too fast to be completely natural, and Diego was absolutely certain that the man had looked at them with recognition on his face. Very soon, he would be walking right by Five and the others. If Five was right and the Commission was after them, then he could very well try to murder them right now, before Diego and Allison had a chance to get to their siblings.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Diego muttered, before he dove between two cars and dashed across the street. He could hear Allison behind him, the quick thumping of her heels on the pavement as she ran. Diego slalomed between pedestrians, trying not to lose sight of his target, who’d started to hurry his steps as much as he could without breaking into a run. 

“Luther! Hey!” Diego shouted once he thought his brother was within earshot. “That guy is trying to get away! Guy in a suit!”

The guy in question started running. It was a mistake, because it made him easy to identify for Luther, who stepped into his path, hunched with his arms open like he was getting ready to catch a ball. The guy spun around, saw Diego and Allison closing in on him, and then decided to run into traffic. He managed to get on the other side of the street without getting hit by a car, although it triggered a clamor of honking horns and irritated curses from some of the drivers. Diego was reaching down for one of his knives, when he heard the quiet hum that signaled Five’s space warping. 

The man in the suit didn’t seem to have expected Five materializing right in front of him, which was stupid of him. Diego saw him fold in two from what must have been a knee in the gut or in the balls and didn’t waste time before crossing the street once again—more honking horns, more yelling, not that he cared. He reached the man and Five right when the man had recovered from Five’s blow and was obviously getting ready to retaliate. Diego let a knife slide into his hand and pressed the tip against the man’s side, hard enough for him to feel a prick. 

“You touch my brother and I’ll bleed you like a pig,” Diego whispered into the man’s ear. He couldn’t see the man’s face, just his thinning, pepper-and-salt hair and the sweat-soaked collar of his shirt. “Are we cool?” 

The man nodded. Someone else might have swallowed, or breathed harshly, but if the man had the same sort of training as Five did, then he must have blood as cold as ice running in his veins. Speaking of Five, _he_ was breathing way too loudly for Diego’s peace of mind.

“You doing okay, Five?” Diego asked, but he didn’t get any response. 

Allison joined him, followed closely by Luther and Vanya, with a dark-haired woman that Diego didn’t know, but who had the familiar air of someone about to call the cops. _Uh oh_.

“Who _are_ you people?” she asked. Her voice was tense, but fortunately she wasn’t shouting and drawing undue attention to them. “What’s going on?”

“Uh, it’s a little complicated,” Luther tried.

“Complicated how?”

Diego felt the man he was holding at knife point twitch and he pressed his knife harder to let him know not to take advantage of the situation. “Guys,” he said. “We have to move it somewhere else. We’re too exposed.”

“No,” the woman said, “I want to know what’s happening and why Five is—involved in this.”

So this was a friend of Five’s. And she probably thought he was an innocent thirteen-year-old kid mixed up in dangerous business, so she wasn’t going to let it go so easily. It was certainly admirable, but it was in moments like this that Diego wished Allison didn’t have so many misgivings about using her power now. 

“Samira,” Five said. His voice was strained, and when Diego looked over his captive’s shoulder, he saw that his brother was white-faced under a sheen of sweat and wavering on his feet like a drunk. “Do you remember those Umbrella Academy kids from about twelve years ago?”

“Those children in the masks? With powers?”

“Well, that’s us,” Five said with a crooked, sardonic smile. “Except we’re not children anymore. _I_ ’m not a child. We’ve made some enemies and the police is _not_ going to know how to deal with them. You’re not helping right now, you’re hindering. And now—” His voice quivered. “Now I’m going to pass out.”

He promptly pitched forward and would have fallen on his face if Luther hadn’t caught him and scooped him up, cradling him in his arms like a sick child.

“Is he all right?” Vanya asked anxiously, getting on her tiptoes to try and have a look at Five.

“He’s out cold,” Luther said. He adjusted his grip on their unconscious brother. “He’s been bleeding through his bandages.”

“I’ll do them again,” Allison said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We need to get out of here.”

“I very much agree with that.” It was the man in the suit who’d spoken, and it had the merit of immediately capturing everyone’s attention. “This is against protocol, but I suppose we need to talk.”

—-

Five’s identifying them as the kids from the Umbrella Academy had unsettled his friend Samira enough that she let them go without much of a fuss. Luther hoped she wasn’t going to call the police, but if she did, he hoped that they had the time to deal with the man who was apparently from the Commission. He was now in their living room, tightly bound to a chair, with both Luther and Diego standing in front of him with their arms crossed, watching him unwaveringly. He’d answered ‘Lukas’ when asked for his name, not specifying whether it was a first name, a last name or a code name. He was a middle-aged, unremarkable white man with very pale eyebrows and eyelashes, and clear, almost colorless eyes. 

Klaus, who’d come back about ten minutes earlier with—presumably—Ben in tow, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, noisily eating a bag of chips. “So, are we, like, going to torture this guy or what?” he said, spluttering fragments of chips as he spoke. He sounded unbothered, but Luther thought he could detect an edge to his tone. 

“No, of course not,” Luther said, horrified at the thought, before it occurred to him that it might have been better to let the man _think_ that they were going to torture him. “Um, I mean—”

Allison entered the room at that moment, sparing him from elaborating further. “How’s Five?” they all asked at almost the same time—all except for Lukas, of course.

“Sleeping,” Allison said. “Vanya is staying with him in case he pulls another disappearing act on us.”

She looked at their prisoner, which refocused everyone on him. Luther wondered uneasily how they were going to get him to talk. He felt like he should be taking the lead here, but this wasn’t a fighting situation and there was no immediate threat, so he was very much out of his depths. None of them had been trained in interrogation techniques—except for Five, maybe, but this obviously wasn’t an option at the moment.

“Well, then,” Diego said, stepping up—because of course he couldn’t let Luther’s moment of hesitation go to waste. “You have two options here, _Lukas_. Either you talk—”

“You can spare me the macho posturing,” Lukas said. He had a faint accent that Luther couldn’t identify, something vaguely European. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“Really?” Luther said, unable to keep the skepticism out of his voice. “Just like that?”

“I’m not paid nearly well enough to go through long, tedious interrogation sessions. What do you want to know?”

“Your mission,” Allison said softly—softly because of her voice, but the look on her face was anything but soft. “What was it?”

“Surveillance,” Lukas said. “My superiors are concerned by Number Five’s time-traveling power. When you’re an agency that relies on time-travel tech, the idea that someone might naturally possess the ability to do the same thing and mess up all of your good work is… worrying.”

His eyes flickered at his briefcase, which sat against a wall, way out of his reach, looking completely innocuous. It was like his gun to a cop, Five had once said. If they destroyed it, Lukas would be in deep shit with his hierarchy.

“That’s it?” Luther asked. “No assassination?”

“No apocalypse?” Klaus asked.

“There’ve been a lot of changes in management.” Lukas shrugged. He managed to do it very casually, for someone whose arms were bound behind his back. “The party line has been modified. I can’t tell you more about it, because it’s above my pay grade. I just know that we’re not aiming for the apocalypse anymore.”

“What about the tracker?” Allison asked. 

“What tracker?” Lukas asked, looking troubled for the first time. 

“The tracker on Five.”

“Well, Number Five had a tracker when he was working for the Commission. I guess they were worried he would prove to be fickle—and they turned out to be validated in that belief. But from the reports I read, he got rid of the tracker when he landed in 2019. If he’d had a new one implanted, I would have been informed of it. It would have made following him much easier.”

“What about the man in the park?” Klaus asked. “Question from Ben.”

“I don’t know about a man in a park.”

“Well, weren’t you watching him today?”

“Your brother caught sight of me a couple of days ago and tried to ambush me. I decided to… lay low for a little while, hoping he’d eventually believe that he’d been mistaken.”

Klaus let out a hoot of laughter. “Ha! Five. Believe he was mistaken.” He was chewing with his mouth open and Luther wrinkled his nose in disgust. “It’s almost cute that you’d think that, actually. Haven’t interacted a lot with him, have you?”

“How can we trust that what you’re telling us is the truth?” Diego asked.

“Very easily,” Lukas said. “Ask you sister to use her power on me.”

They all looked at Allison. Klaus even closed his mouth. Luther could tell from her expression that she hated being put in that position and his heart went to her. Rumoring Lukas would make it sure that they could trust what he was saying in a way nothing else could. Beating him up wouldn’t make his information any more reliable, and that was without mentioning how abhorrent Luther found it to hit a man who was tied up. But he knew that Allison felt that her power had warped her in such a way that she wasn’t sure who she was anymore. By not using it, she was trying to figure herself out, and he didn’t want to get in the way of that.

“It’s your call, Allison,” he told her gently. “No one will pressure you into this. Right, guys?”

“Yeah, no,” Klaus said.

“Of course not,” Diego said.

“Ben says, ‘It’s up to you, Allison,’” Klaus said. “‘We’re behind you whatever you decide.’ Ben again, but I agree with the sentiment.”

“Thanks, guys,” Allison said with a tight smile. “But it’s fine. It’s the better option. Are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked Lukas.

“Oh, yes. I want to keep this as quick and painless as possible.”

“All right.” Allison swallowed, then took a deep breath. “I heard a rumor that you couldn’t lie to us.” Lukas’ face froze and his eyes shone silver. “Now, answer my question: was what you told us the truth, and nothing but the truth?”

“Yes.” His voice had changed subtly. Not only did it sound unnaturally emotionless, but it had also lost its accent. Had the accent been an affectation?

“No more apocalypse, then?”

“No. The apocalypse isn’t part of the Commission’s approved timeline anymore.”

“If we let you go, what will you do?”

“Continue to watch Number Five. Pretend to my superiors that you never caught me out.”

“You won’t try to kill him, or hurt any of us?”

“Not unless I get a change of assignment.”

Allison sighed and looked toward Luther and Diego. “I don’t know what else I should ask. What do we do?”

“Let’s talk—” Luther’s eyes slid to Lukas. “—a little more privately.”

They withdrew to the other side of the room. Luther had to nudge Klaus so he’d come with them. “Oh, am I invited too?” he said, and Luther rolled his eyes at him.

“Here’s what I think,” Luther told his siblings. “If we kill him, then the Commission will just send someone else. They might also change the assignment from surveillance to assassination, and I’ve had enough of people trying to kill us.”

“So we’re just going to let him go?” Diego said in a low voice, throwing a look over his shoulder at Lukas.

“I’m with our fearless leader on this one,” Klaus said. “Not murdering a man sounds like an appealing option.”

“We don’t have to _murder_ him. We could—”

“Keep him prisoner indefinitely? Lock him up in the attic and throw away the key?”

“Well, I don’t know, I’d have thought you’d consider that option with some favor, Number One. Isn’t locking up people your specialty?”

A mix of emotions burst inside Luther’s chest—hurt, anger, guilt. He knew he should just let it slide, that Diego was merely lashing out blindly, like he always did when something wrong-footed him. It was one thing to know that, and entirely another one to be able to curb his instinctive response to a provocation from Diego.

“That’s enough,” Allison whispered furiously, stepping between them before Luther had the time to say anything. “Diego, what the hell?”

“Sorry,” Diego mumbled. His jaw was working, like he was gnashing his teeth, and his expression was tight and angry, but when his eyes flickered at Luther there was genuine remorse in them.

“It’s fine,” Luther said. The poisonous mix of hurt and guilt still seethed in his chest, but he could count the number of times Diego had apologized to him in their lifetime on the fingers of one hand—and vice-versa, to be honest.

“We shouldn’t make any decision without Five and Vanya, anyway,” Allison said. 

“Are we sure we want to ask Five his opinion on the matter?” Klaus asked. “He hasn’t exactly been rational about this.”

“Well, according to that guy here, he was only half-crazy,” Luther said. “He was right about the Commission being up to something. Okay, we’ll just let him stew for a while, until Five is awake and… coherent.”

“Okay,” Klaus said with a sigh, crushing his empty bag of chips in his fist. “Then I guess I’ll go makee coffee or something.”

He gave Lukas a wide berth as he left the room. The man wasn’t under Allison’s control anymore, and he had a way of examining everything and everyone in the room that Luther had to admit was a little uncomfortable. Luther drew a chair so he could sit in front of him.

“Have you come to a decision?” Lukas asked. 

Luther didn’t answer, keeping his face impassive. It couldn’t hurt to make the man a little uncomfortable in his turn. 

“Okay, then,” Lukas murmured.

—-

Vanya only realized she’d dozed off when she heard Five make a sound. She was sitting on Five’s desk chair, which was hard on her back, and had rested her head on her cupped hand, her elbow propped on the desk. She startled awake, her elbow skidding off the edge. Five’s eyes were wide open and he was staring at the ceiling, his breathing a little too quick for someone who’d just woken up. 

“Five!” she said, wiping at the corner of her mouth to check if she’d been drooling. “You—how are you feeling?”

His eyes flickered at her. “Vanya?” he said, as though he’d only noticed her there. “I… I don’t know what…”

“You fainted,” Vanya explained. She saw his mouth twist at the word ‘fainted’ and had to contain a smile. “You were out for a few hours. Do you want anything to drink, or to eat, or—”

“No, I… There was something I—” His eyes widened further and he gasped, “The Commission! Where’s the man we caught? Where are the others?”

He tried to scramble into a sitting position, leaning too hard on his injured arm and then hissing in pain. “Whoa, calm down!” Vanya exclaimed. “Everything is fine. Everybody is okay—well, except for you.”

She gave his chest a gentle push, feeling his heart thunder under her hand. He let himself be guided back down, looking at her with eyes where she could read such open fear and confusion that it broke her heart. She’d never seen him with his guard down since he’d come back. He barely ever relaxed and certainly didn’t show everything he felt. A flash of openness was a good thing, but she wished the circumstances for it were different.

“The others have interrogated the man,” she explained. “He said he was on a surveillance mission for the Commission. He was watching you.”

She shared with him everything that she knew from Luther’s update a couple of hours earlier. She’d been waiting for someone to come and tell her what they’d learned, but she’d been expecting Allison or maybe Klaus. Luther hadn’t lingered after he’d recounted everything they knew and told her that they were waiting for her and Five before they made a decision. He’d stood by Five’s bed for maybe a minute, watching their brother sleep and then fussing a little awkwardly with the bedsheet before leaving. 

“What about the tracker?” Five asked when she was done, flexing the fingers of his left hand absentmindedly. It had to hurt, but nothing in his expression betrayed it.

“There was no tracker,” Vanya said.

Five looked at her, his eyes intent and sharp. “How could she find me so easily, then?” 

Vanya wasn’t sure who was ‘she’, exactly, but she had a feeling that ‘she’ hadn’t been real. “Um, well,” she said, trying to figure out the best way to put it. “From what that man, Lukas, told the others, there was never anyone else following you.”

“How can they be certain of that?” Five asked. 

“Allison rumored him. On his own demand. He was telling the truth.”

Even though she could see why it had been necessary, mentions of her sister’s power still made Vanya’s stomach flip uneasily. Five didn’t seem to share any of her disquiet on the topic—but then he’d _asked_ Allison to rumor him at one point. He frowned thoughtfully, as though including that new information to his internal calculations.

“Then she might have not been real,” he said.

“I, well, I guess not,” she said, surprised that he would admit it so easily. 

“And the tracker wasn’t real either,” he said, using a finger to trace a line over the bandages on his right arm. He didn’t sound upset about it, only inquisitive. 

“No,” Vanya said. “I’m sorry, Five.”

“There’s no reason for you to be sorry,” he said, like the fact that he’d self-mutilated for nothing was only anecdotal. “It’s a good thing. Everything you told me is good news. If the Commission doesn’t want the apocalypse anymore, then they’ll leave you alone. Everything is fine.”

“If you say so.”

“Dolores wasn’t sure about the tracker,” Five said. He winced, the expression so quick Vanya almost thought she’d imagined it. “I should have listened to her.”

Vanya’s blood turned to ice at his words. For a moment, she wasn’t sure what to say, wasn’t sure she should say anything. What if she’d never told him about what had happened to Dolores in the first place? It might have avoided the whole debacle—but then again, maybe not, and she didn’t want to lie to him, even by omission. She hated lies. 

“Five, don’t you remember?” she said very softly, afraid that one word would be enough to shatter him. He was so strong, possibly the strongest of them, but the cracks were showing and they ran deep.

“Remember what?”

“Dolores is gone. The store, it—” _Killed her_.

Five stared at her for a very long time, just holding her eyes unblinkingly and not saying anything, his jaw locked and his lips pressed tight. His eyes burned her but she forced herself not to look away. He turned his head toward the wall and made a sound like a piece of paper tearing. Vanya’s hands fluttered uncertainly, wanting to touch him but afraid it’d feel like an aggression to him.

“I remember,” he said thickly.

“What do you want to do about that man, that Lukas?”

“Let him go and continue his mission.” He still sounded choked, but his tone got more businesslike as he spoke. “Luther’s right, they will only send someone else if we kill him. Better the devil you know.”

He rubbed his face, blinking a few times in rapid succession, but it was only when he yawned that she realized he was still very tired and was fighting sleep. 

“You should get some more rest,” she said. “We’ll talk again when you feel better.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. As his eyes closed, two tears trickled down from the corners. He mumbled, “Will you stay?”

“Of course,” she said, reaching out and giving his wrist a brief squeeze. “You can sleep and not worry about anything. I’ll be there when you wake up.”

In a few minutes he was breathing softly, out like a light. Vanya leaned back in her chair and sighed. Him looking so young, especially in sleep, always made _her_ feel young, and that wasn’t a good feeling at all. But she didn’t like it either when he said things that reminded her that he actually was an old man who’d lived through unimaginable trials, because she knew that she, or at least another version of her, had been the one who’d pressed the metaphorical trigger on the apocalypse. Other people had contributed to it, but _she_ had done it in the end, and the only person in the world who still suffered from the consequences was Five. He could be matter-of-fact about his fractured mind, but she couldn’t. 

She put her elbow on the desk next to her and rested her head on her hand again. Lulled by Five’s rhythmic breathing, she fell asleep too. 

—-

“Are you sure about this?” Ben asked.

“Yeah, I’m _sure_ ,” Klaus said. “That was, like, my whole motivation for getting sober in the first place, so I’m really pretty sure I want to do this.”

“I don’t know, because you haven’t tried again for over three months, so I thought—”

“Ben.”

“—that maybe you were afraid of doing it.”

“What?” Klaus said, aware that his voice was pitched too high. “Pff, afraid of what?”

Ben looked at him, quirking an eyebrow, and Klaus groaned inwardly. He should know better than to challenge Ben. “I don’t know,” Ben said. “ _You_ tell me.”

“Well, I’m not afraid anymore. See how unafraid I am? I feel positively daring.”

He cleared his throat, then gave his room a critical look. Maybe he should tidy it up a bit. Just take care of the clothes that were strewn all over the room, dust a little and get rid of the ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. Open a window, too. Did ghosts have a sense of smell? He’d never thought to ask Ben. 

_You’re stalling. Get to it, you big baby._

“Do you want me to leave?” Ben asked.

“No, no, it’s fine. I actually want—I’m kind of doing it today because I want to introduce him to the family, sort of.”

“You want to bring your dead boyfriend to Dolores’ funeral?”

Dolores’ funeral. Now was a funeral where Klaus didn’t have to worry about meeting the dead person, which tended to make funerals awkward for him. His siblings had thought of it as a way to give Five some closure about losing Dolores, like doing a pretend ceremony would be enough to tame the crazy. It had been three weeks since Five’s temporary bout of insanity and Five had been acting rather normal, or at least as normal as he ever acted. Maybe the fake funeral _would_ do him some good, who knew. Klaus had never seen the point of funerals in general, but then he had an unusual relationship with death.

“I think that’s the perfect occasion,” he said. “Everyone will be on their best behavior for Five’s sake. I won’t _show_ Dave during the funeral—this is Five’s moment, I don’t want to distract anyone from that.”

“I was hoping you’d make me visible for the funeral,” Ben said. He looked hesitant, as he always was when he talked about Klaus using his power to manifest him. It was like he thought it was selfish of him to ask.

“I can do both at the same time, no problem,” Klaus said. “It’s only the summoning part that will require any effort at all. After that, whether he wants to stay or go is totally up to him.”

Just saying it reignited the worry that Dave wouldn’t want to see him or would be put off by… everything about Klaus’ life and about the secrets he’d carried with him. When he’d just come back from Vietnam, there had been an urgency to his desire to summon Dave that hadn’t let him worry about anything else. The apocalypse had gotten in the way, then family drama, and then he’d had way too much time on his hands to think. Think about things like, ‘ _Wouldn’t it be better to preserve the memory of him being in love with you? What if he hates that you lied to him? What if your life story turns out to be too crazy for him to handle? What if death has given him sudden clarity and he realizes what a mistake he made by dating you in the first place?’_

He hadn’t shared any of it with Ben, because Ben would tell him he was being an idiot and he would be right. He hadn’t talked about it with his other siblings either, because they’d all had a lot on their plates.

“Okay,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I’m ready. More than ready. I’m brimming with readiness."

He wished that he needed some sort of ritual to summon ghosts. That would have given him something to focus his mind on. Maybe he should light a few candles and draw a pentacle on the floor just for the hell of it. Yeah, and then Ben would never let him live it down. 

“Dave?” he called, looking up at the ceiling—a dumb reflex, because he knew Dave’s ghost wouldn’t be descending from the sky. “Dave, I’m ready to talk. If you don’t mind, or have anything else better to do. I’m not sure what spirits do in the afterlife, actually. Dad had a barber’s shop, but maybe he just—”

And then Dave was there, having materialized without a sound or a breath of wind, and he was standing in front of Klaus looking the same as when he’d died. _Exactly_ the same, down to the ugly wound on his chest.

“Klaus,” he said, then smiled his blinding smile. It felt like staring at the sun.

“Hey, Dave,” Klaus said in a tremulous voice. His heart was doing that thing where it was trying to escape his chest by breaking through his ribs. “So, uh, bad news: you’re dead.”

“Yeah,” Dave said. He gestured at his bloody front. “I’ve noticed.”

“And you remember that time we were drunk, and I told you I could see dead people, and you laughed because you thought I was joking? Well, I—”

“I know, Klaus. Death has a way of making some things seem less extraordinary.” His smiled wavered. “I, uh, I’m sorry that I—”

“No, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Klaus said, waving his hands to brush off Dave’s apology. “I know how it sounded. I didn’t summon you to yell at you. I just wanted to—to see you and talk to you, and…” At the corner of his eye, Klaus was aware that Ben had backed away, like he wanted them to be able to pretend he wasn’t there. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. It’s really a lot, and I don’t want to get into it right away or all at once. For now, I just want you to meet my family. There’s my brother Ben. He’s dead, like you, so, uh, that’s already one thing you have in common.”

Dave and Ben exchanged a stilted little wave. Dave’s eyes went from Klaus to Ben, and then back to Klaus, giving Klaus the feeling that he was puzzled by the very obvious lack of family resemblance between them but didn’t dare ask about it.

“Our life story is something else,” Klaus said in answer to the unspoken question, “but I’ll tell you all about it later. Right now, we have to go to a funeral.” Someone knocked on the door. “Yeah?”

The door opened and Allison’s head poked out of the gap. “Ready for the funeral?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’ll come down in a minute.”

“And take your umbrella. It’s raining.”

“Seriously?” Klaus took a peek out the window and saw that water was running down the window panes like tears. “Of course it is. Gonna ruin my make-up.”

“I already said you could borrow my eyeliner. It’s waterproof.”

“Yeah, but you always yell at me when I take your stuff.”

“When you do it without permission, of course I yell at you,” Allison said. “Is—is Ben coming too?” 

Allison looked almost apologetic and Klaus knew that she was really asking whether Klaus would make him visible. 

He gave her a smile. “Yeah, of course. He wants to be there for Five.”

“Great. See you two in a minute, then.”

She closed the door and Klaus turned to Dave. “So that was Allison. Classy, right? She’s a movie star, you know. Well, she’s taking a break from acting right now for… reasons I’ll elaborate later.”

“Is she your sister?”

“Yeah, one of two sisters.”

“Younger or older?”

“Oh, we’re the same age. All of us were born on the same day. It’s, uh, it’s a thing. Kind of a long story.”

Dave seemed to absorb the information. Klaus chewed on his lower lip as he waited for him to say something. There were only so many times Klaus could say that he would explain things later before Dave would lose patience, but they really needed to go to the funeral now.

“How many siblings do you have?”

“Six in total, including Ben and Allison. So four you haven’t seen yet. Come on, we’re going to meet them.”

Klaus worked his trick to make Ben visible, and he would be lying if he said that he didn’t get off on how impressed Dave looked with his glowing fists. Klaus promised that he would do the same to him later, and they made their way to the courtyard where the phony funeral would take place.

It was technically the same place where they’d spread Dad’s ashes, even if it looked different. There was no statue of Ben, for one. All of Klaus’ siblings were dressed in black and holding an umbrella, and the scene was so reminiscent of the ceremony for Dad that it weirded Klaus out. That funeral had marked a big turn in their lives—not so much in itself, but for what had happened right before and then later on. The change was mostly for the better, but to think of the person he’d been then and the one he was now gave Klaus vertigo. He generally preferred to avoid too much self-reflection; it was bad for your skin.

Everyone’s attention was immediately drawn to Ben, which made Ben lit up like a neon sign, and Klaus took advantage of it to keep a running commentary for Dave’s benefit.

“That’s Luther, our Number One. I know, he’s big—wait until you’ve seen him in short sleeves. Next to him is Vanya, she’s a violinist; she’s pretty good, or at least I think she is? Dunno anything about classical music, to be honest. Then there’s Diego—would you believe that he always dresses like that? And—”

He’d tried to speak in a murmur, but it apparently wasn’t low enough for Five’s sharp ears, because Five frowned and said, “What are you muttering about, Klaus?”

He looked much better than he had only a week ago, too pale and too quiet—at least now he’d upgraded from monosyllabic answers to sometimes engaging in a real conversation. His wounds were healing nicely and he wasn’t limping anymore. He was wearing his Umbrella Academy uniform, the only one he had left since he’d been wearing it on the day of the Apocalypse that Wasn’t, as Klaus liked to call it. Klaus grinned at him broadly, hoping to change his expression of tightly contained pain to one of exasperation. A pissed-off Five was one who wasn’t busy brooding.

“Oh, you know, just narrating the great story of my life.” Five rolled his eyes and redirected his attention to Ben. “So that was our Number Five,” Klaus whispered, trying not to move his lips. “Don’t take him personally, he’s kind of a cranky bastard.”

“I thought all of your siblings were the same age as you.”

“We were all born on the same day. But Five’s age is… a complicated matter.”

“That you’ll explain later.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

Luther coughed loudly to catch everyone’s attention and signal the beginning of the funeral. Diego, who’d disappeared while Klaus was talking to Dave, came back carrying a wooden box that was the size of half a mannequin. Klaus didn’t know if it was empty or if there was something inside to weigh it. Luther had brought a shovel and in no time, he’d dug a hole where he put the box that Diego handed to him. Rain dripped from the pointy ends of Klaus umbrella in perfectly formed droplets and it kept distracting him from the ceremony.

“Do you want to say a few words?” Luther asked Five.

“Yes. I suppose I should.” 

Five was holding his umbrella in a bloodless grip. His eyes were dry, his jaw contracted, and someone who didn’t know him would have thought that he looked angry rather than grieving. They all knew better, expect for Dave. It occurred to Klaus that he hadn’t even told Dave who they were burying. It was kind of a lot to explain; in order for Dave not to think it ridiculous that Five was mourning a mannequin, Klaus would have needed to tell him Five’s entire harrowing life story and he just didn’t feel up to it at the moment.

Vanya stepped closer to Five in wordless support and he cast her the faintest of smiles. He cleared his throat and stared right ahead before he started speaking, “She was my companion for a long time. For decades I had no one else and she prevented me from—going insane, I guess. From losing myself entirely. She kept me in check; she kept me going. She always said that I would manage to get back and save the world and, well, she was right. She was right about most things. She was my better half, and now she’s gone.” He cleared his throat again. “That’s it. Let’s get this over with.”

One by one, they walked in front of the hole to throw a handful of dirt in it. Klaus had to contain the urge to giggle the whole time. It wasn’t that he thought that the situation was funny, or that he didn’t care about Five’s very real pain, but just that it was a curse of his that he was always hit by the desire to laugh at the most inappropriate moments. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep it in—Five _would_ kill him if he thought Klaus was making fun of the circumstances, and he would be right to do it.

Luther filled the hole with the dirt he had piled next to it, and there was some talk about what they should put here to mark the spot. Then there was another protracted moment when no one said or did anything, but didn’t dare move until Five had said it was over.

“Hot cocoa in the kitchen, anyone?” Vanya eventually said, which triggered a response of relieved agreement from everyone. Klaus had a hole in his shoe and his sock was soaked through, which made the idea of steaming hot cocoa sound heavenly, not to mention that the strain from maintaining Ben was giving him a headache.

“Wait,” Five said as they were all starting to move. He was still standing by the fresh grave, looking down at it. “I have something else to say.”

“But we could do it out of the rain—” Klaus started to say, but he was shushed by Ben and Allison.

Five had his back on them, making it impossible for Klaus to read him. He held himself hunched, looking from behind like a very short old man stooped by the years. “I know I’m not… the friendliest person. I know that I can give the impression that I don’t care. About you all, I mean.”

“Five, we know—” Luther said, but stopped when Allison elbowed him in the side.

“If I say that I care, these are just words. They don’t _mean_ anything. Everyone can say things they don’t mean. No one knows what’s really in a person’s mind. I don’t know what’s in any of your minds. You grew up without me and have become… more. Something I have no grasp on. But for the years, the decades I spent in the apocalypse, I only ever had one goal in mind. It was because of that goal that I got up in the morning. That I found ways to survive in a world that did _not_ want me there. That I breathed an air chock-full of ashes, when it would have been easier to stop breathing. That I picked myself up when I was so sick or injured that it would have been easier to stay down. That I killed people, innocent people, because the job the Commission gave me was my only ticket out of that hellhole and could get me closer to what I wanted.” 

A blast of wind and rain slapped him in the face and disheveled his perfectly combed hair. Klaus’ throat ached like he’d swallowed something pointy. “My only goal,” Five said, unmovable as a stone pillar. “The goal of a lifetime. That one day, I would find my way back to you and save the world you live in.”

Silence filled the courtyard. None of them moved, like they’d all been turned into statues. Klaus couldn’t even hear the patter of rain drops on his umbrella anymore and he felt like he’d just been sucker punched in the gut. Allison wiped a finger at the corner of her eye, but Klaus only realized that he was crying too when Dave asked, “Klaus, are you all right?”

“That’s all I had to say,” Five said, then turned on his heels and walked back into the house, keeping his head down.

“So, uh,” Klaus said to Dave, coughing a little in an effort to make the lump in his throat go away. “You’ve now met my family. Don’t tell me I never take you anywhere fun.”

“Who the fuck are you talking to?” Diego said, so aggressively that it could only be because he was as upset as Klaus felt.

“Oh, it’s just Dave, my dead boyfriend from Vietnam.”

“What?” Luther said in a faint voice. He sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand against his nose.

“I’ll introduce him to you guys later. You said something about hot cocoa, Vanya? I could really go for—” _a hit_ “—some hot cocoa right now.”

“I… I think I should maybe go after him,” Vanya said, her small face pale and strained. “Or someone. One of us should go after him.”

“Let’s go back inside and make some hot cocoa,” Allison said, slipping her arm under Vanya’s. “He’ll find us if he needs to. He’s found us after having been lost in time for decades.”

“Hey, guys,” Klaus said, almost managing to keep his voice from cracking. “You heard it like me, right? Five told us, ‘I love you.’”

Allison started chuckling quietly, followed by Luther. Vanya managed a wan smile and Diego shook his head. Dave looked extremely confused and Klaus felt a twinge of guilt needle his conscience—okay, maybe he hadn’t really thought through the timing for his summoning, but he would make it up to Dave and he was getting rather hopeful that Dave wouldn’t run for the ghostly hills once he had the whole story.

“That he did,” Ben said. “What do you know? Miracles do happen.”

He smiled back at Klaus. The expression looked a little eerie on his bluish, glowing face, but it warmed Klaus’ core anyway. In a few minutes, he would need to let go of the power that made Ben visible.

The drizzling rain suddenly became a downpour that crashed over their heads, intent on drowning them. Like a flock of sparrows, they ran together toward the house.

**Author's Note:**

> Your final prompt of "consider if Five got the delusional belief that he still has a tracker in him and has to get it out with knives" really spoke to me. Like, to my soul. This was my humble take on it. :)


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